January 14, 2011
Your Guide to Co-location Hosting
Most people with a website will start off with shared hosting as this offers the best and most cost-effective method of hosting your website. However, when your site has outgrown the shared hosting account you may be interested in dedicated or co-location hosting as this offers much more flexibility.
What is co-location hosting?
Co-location hosting allows you to choose and maintain your own hardware inside a datacenter. While you are responsible for maintaining the server yourself, the hosting company will take care of the connection to the Internet. If you require a highly customized server for your website then this will normally be the best and cheapest way of obtaining this goal.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting is similar to co-location hosting, but different in one key area. With dedicated hosting you will rent the server from the hosting company; however, with co-location hosting you own the server itself. Dedicated hosting means that you do not need to worry about maintaining the server yourself. However, co-location hosting is much more flexible.
Benefits of Co-Location Hosting
Many organizations are starting to realize that co-locating their servers can offer many benefits, including saving money. The size of the data center means that they can invest in extremely reliable connections to the Internet and backup provisions, including diesel generators which will kick in on the event of a power failure.
By co-locating servers it is possible to reduce network traffic on the company's internal network. It's also likely that the datacenter will have more bandwidth available. The extra bandwidth will make sure that your site loads as quickly as possible.
There are however a few disadvantages. You will normally need to travel to the data center yourself in order to perform routine maintenance and deal with hardware problems.
Choosing Co-Location Hosting
If you are interesting co-location hosting, then it’s important to make sure that you’re choosing the right package for your business. There are a number of things that you should look out for from any co-location hosting data center.
Lockable cages - As you own your own hardware it's very important that it is kept safe. There should be lockable cages which will protect your servers while allowing you access for maintenance.
Fire protection - Smoke detectors should be installed as these will detect fires as early as possible. Sprinkler systems and fire doors should be used to isolate fires and prevent major damage.
Air conditioning - Data centers contain a large number of servers which generate a lot of heat. It's important that a high-quality industrial air conditioning system is fitted to keep the temperatures under control. High temperatures can make computer hardware crash and become unstable.
Power - If there is a power cut your server would go down and your website would be unavailable. Data centers solve this by using UPS and backup generators. Uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) are backup battery devices which will keep the servers running until the generators are started. The generators will typically run on diesel and should be able to keep the servers running until power is resumed.
Server monitoring - Most data centers will offer an uptime guarantee. Server monitoring services can be used to see the real-time status of the servers.
Cost – You also need to ensure that you understand all of the costs involved with the co-location hosting service. There will normally be different costs for different types of servers. It’s also worth finding out how much it costs should you exceed your bandwidth allowance.
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