Web Hosting Reviews & Ratings

September 09, 2011

Jumping the Potentially Sinking Colocation Ship

Colocation may seem like a good deal, and in a lot ways it is.  What makes it good, however, is also what makes it unattractive for web hosts to support.

First of all, even though they would never publicly complain about it, dedicated servers provide a web host with far less return on investment.  Whereas a single shared server has hundreds of accounts and can provide a web host with many thousands of dollars a month in various fees, a dedicated server typically has one user on it, resulting in as little as 10% the revenue for the same amount of space taken up.

Not exactly a win-win

A colocation server compounds this problem by presenting the web host with a customized arrangement that often has them learning some software from scratch.  Of course this is what they're paid for, but when a development team is spending hours a day on a single user while being paid by a few hundred thousand of them, the web host will naturally question this return on investment.  This isn't, of course, to mention the increased security risks that come from a server that uses largely customized and untested software.

While there will probably always be at least some hosts that offer it, co-location hosting is suffering a slow motion death in the web hosting world.  Should you go down with the ship, or is it time to upgrade?

A good time to get with the times

This is one case where we are going to advise you to make the leap.  The web hosting world is more heavily moving towards across-the-board standardization in all things, even as it diversifies.  This means that your speciality server is going to get increasingly out of step with computing and programming changes unless you keep up with it specifically, something which is very difficult to do.

More critically, if something happens and you need to move hosts, it's likely that you will have a difficult time moving over anything that's based on some type of custom arrangement.  Again, this is something that web hosts are moving away from, and if a catastrophe occurs, you're not going to want to be frantically searching all over the web for the one place that will take you in, as you are.  If, however, your web site is based off of and runs on standard setups, then moving to a new home, should it come to it, will be far more seamless.

Use your hosts strength

Remember also that when you are an a dedicated server you get the benefits of whatever hosting advancements they make for all of their customers.  If, for example, a new kernel comes out, your co-located server may not be upgraded due to concerns that it would no work with your customizations.  But if you are on a dedicated server that already matches the setup of the rest of their shared server then you get the immediate benefit of these advancements without having to do any dirty work yourself.

Naturally all situations are different, and you look at your own web site on an individual level.  Talk to your web host as well to see if they agree: they might even give you some kind of discount for this switch since in the end this makes it easier for them.  No one way is right for everyone; in this case, however, changing times mean that this is likely going to be right for quite a lot of people.

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