Dedicated Servers: Introduction to Colocation
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Dedicated servers offer a whole host of benefits and types of hosting for online businesses and companies of all sizes, as one of the more desirable solutions available on the market today. One such type is the colocation option, primarily for small businesses who desire to have the same features and performance of a large IT department, but without all of the high costs.
Colocation basically allows you to place your server machine into someone else’s rack and then share the bandwidth that they enjoy as your own. While it certainly costs a lot more than your standard web hosting, it costs far less than what your very own equal-amount of bandwidth operated in-house would cost.
Once everything has been set up and installed, you physically take the machine over to your new colocation partner and then proceed to either install it within a rack or rent out a server machine from the actual colocation provider. The colocation company would then provide the IP address, power to the server, and bandwidth. Once everything is all set and ready to go, you would access all of this in practically the exact same way as you access a web site on any given web hosting provider.
There are many people who think that colocation is one of the best hosting options available out of the “many other optionsâ€Â subset, and this is with good reason, as there is a very long list of its main advantages and benefits. One of the biggest advantages (perhaps, the biggest) of using colocation is the savings with regard to bandwidth cost. Spending less money is always going to be one of the major goals of any company’s bottom line, and colocation helps some companies in achieving this.
Another one of the big reasons that so many people favor server colocation is because the colocation facilities themselves have better outage protection than your normal run of the mill building. Since the majority of these places are operating some very lucrative and important web sites, it’s quite crucial that something like a simple ice storm doesn’t bring everything to a screeching halt for two to three days.
When colocating servers, you may have to share space with some other companies’ machines, but the fact of the matter is that you still own the actual server machinery. If something is too slow or doesn’t have the memory that is needed for whatever reason, you can just upgrade the server instead of worrying about an entire full-on-technological-department-makeover or waiting forever for your provider to eventually get to it, at some location, somewhere down the road.
Participating in colocation also provides some additional security for machine investments. Since the server is both stored and maintained in a secure environment, you never really have to worry about anything fishy happening to it because there will be people watching it at practically all hours of the day.
Although it’s not necessary, many different colocation servers offer an additional service in which they will basically maintain and manage your server for you. In the off-chance that you didn’t have a team of information technology wizards at the ready, it’s certainly nice to know you can fall back on something like this if need be.
As with everything though, there are some disadvantages to colocation. Some of these things include the fact that it’s actually somewhat difficult to find a colocation provider that is near you, the fact that colocation can be more expensive than basic web hosting, and the notion that you always have to go out of your way to someone else’s headquarters to do anything with your dedicated servers. In addition, you have to do it on the colocation server’s time, rather than your own specific schedule – which means less time flexibility overall.
As discussed, colocation isn’t necessarily the perfect solution in terms of “other web hosting optionsâ€Â but it certainly has enough going for it with just a small downside. No matter what your opinion or preference on colocation may be, it is clear that it certainly makes the most sense for certain types of companies.
Individuals who run small web sites for their own personal pleasure are probably not going to be prime real estate for possibly jumping into a colocation server relationship. However, if someone with a personalized web site needed their server to be especially fancy, such as something much, much more than what a standard web host could offer, then colocation could be a very good option.
In the end, colocation is just another possible web hosting option to consider, in the mix of what is available for the various different kinds of business operations on the Internet today. Colocation will most likely always be available in some way shape or form, as a viable solution for quite a few companies.
Superb Internet provides single server or full rack colocation, in its superior, world-class data centers located across the US. Superb’s data centers offer the very best in high performance connectivity and professional, onsite server technicians and administrators, guaranteeing that servers are always online.
Superb also provides a complete range of managed dedicated server web hosting solutions, from virtual shared web hosting through to high-volume, mission-critical dedicated server solutions. SuperbHosting.net’s core focus is customer service, and continuous service improvement, with offices and 24-hour/365-day operations in McLean, VA, Tukwila, WA, and Vancouver, BC, serving customers in over 150 countries worldwide.
View further information on Dedicated Servers here.
About The Author To change this standard text, you have to enter some information about your self in the Dashboard -> Users -> Your Profile box. Read more from this authorRelated posts:
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