Who can benefit from Colocation?

Colocation is a type of dedicated web hosting. Dedicated Hosting means a website is hosted on its own server, and not shared with any other sites. With colocation clients have their own dedicated server which they control, but hire rackspace at a data centre. They use the data centre’s infrastructure and pay a free for it.

Here we take a look at who can benefit from using Colocation hosting.

WEBSITES THAT HAVE A LOT OF TRAFFIC

Share hosting is not sufficient for sites that have a high amount of traffic. It is therefore necessary for these sites to be hosted on a dedicated server. This is simply because if a website is sharing everything, including bandwidth, with other sites there is unlikely to be sufficient bandwidth available to host a site that receives an extreme amount of traffic.

THOSE WITHOUT THE FACILITIES TO HOST THEIR OWN SERVER

Many website owners would like to have their own server but simply don’t have, and are unable to have, the necessary facilities. This could be due to infrastructure or the lack of enough physical space. Colocation for these people, is the perfect solution. They have their own server as they wish but are able to use a data centre’s facilities, so overcome the problem of not having this infrastructure themselves.

THOSE WHO WANT CONTROL BUT DON’T HAVE THE BUDET TO HOST THEIR OWN SERVER

Colocation is cheaper than some other forms of dedicated hosting as the clients are performing the hosting and maintenance tasks themselves. Hosting your own server is an expensive business though. There needs to be investment in the facilities for them only to be used by themselves. If the server is hosted at a data centre, then many of the facilities can be shared with their other clients and this reduces the costs.

ANYONE WHO NEEDS THEIR HOSTING TO CONSTANTLY RUN SMOOTHLY

A dedicated server is a lot less likely to encounter problems than a shared server, as websites are not affected by other sites. So if a website owner can simply not afford to have problems then colocation is one of the options available to them.

BUSINESSES THAT ARE EXPECTED TO GROW

It is not advisable just to think about the present; you also need to think about the future. If a small business, or start-up business, is expecting to grow in the future it is best to take this into consideration when choosing their hosting. Hosting requirements may be minimal to begin with – the website might be small with little traffic – but if there is a dramatic rise in the business’s success then they could encounter problems if they have only chosen basic hosting. With Colocation clients sometimes only have to pay for the bandwidth, electricity, and other factor, they are using. With other types of dedicated hosting they need to choose a particular package and therefore if they are using less than predicted they will still be paying for it. The advantage of colocation for growing businesses is that they will only have to pay a small amount when they are using a limited amount of these variables, but can then use more if they unexpectedly need to.

Andrew Marshall (c)

Interoute is a provider of Colocation services.