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Best Colocation Questions to Ask Your Provider

Posted by QuoteColo on November 05, 2013 - Updated on November 04, 2013

 colocation questions

If you’re new to the colocation industry and you’re not sure what to ask for, don’t worry, QuoteColo has your definitive guide to getting started. Below are the top five questions you should ask your potential colocation web hosting provider when determining if you should or if you shouldn’t invest with them.

Will My IT Solutions Have Room to Grow?

Colocation needs to be looked at as a long-term investment. The client’s investment is in trusting a colocation data center facility to properly handle their IT business critical solutions for months to years. As the client, because you have plans to grow your business, increase traffic to your website and hire more employees (meaning stronger internal colocation servers for exchange and telephony), you need to know if your colocation web hosting provider has room in their data center to allow for your growth. This means asking if your dedicated colocation service has room to allow you to grow from a quarter rack to a half rack to a full rack and beyond.

Before investing your colocation or Cloud hosting needs with a web hosting provider, make sure they have room set aside for your company growth.

Will I have to Manage My Colocation Needs?

Every business owner understands how hard it can be to relinquish control of any aspect of their company and yet, when it comes to colocation servers, relinquishing management to your data center facility provider is a good thing. If you’re the kind of company who would rather worry about their core products and serving their customer base better, allowing your colocation provider to handle the management aspect of your web hosting servers frees you to focus on what matters. Before investing in a dedicated server solution, know if they offer managed colocation or not. Trust is, for most companies who don’t want to deal with the IT solutions, managed colocation services are a lifesaver.

What Tier Data Center Do You Operate Out Of?

Colocation is a long term investment in both your dedicated server, Cloud hosting or managed dedicated server provider of choice and the data center which they operate out of. Think of it like this: if you decided to invest in a restaurant you would want to know their staff is top notch and the facility which they operate from is also top notch. Investing in colocation is no different. Before investing in a colocation hosting provider, understand what tier data center they operate out of (1 – 4) and understand how each tier will impact your company IT solutions. It isn’t talked about enough yet knowing data center downtime, data center redundancy rates and data center security policies are highly important to every business looking into colocation services.

How Much Downtime Will My IT Solutions Have?

This is a direct follow up to understanding the tier data center your colocation host operates out of. Understanding the amount of downtime your provider will have on a yearly basis means understanding how long your critical customer facing business solutions will be offline in a year span. Understanding downtime means understanding if your IT needs will be down for 30 minutes per year or less than a minute per year. 30 minutes might not seem like a lot of downtime per year but what if that downtime comes during Cyber Monday? You wouldn’t like it.

Do You Operate From a Data Redundant Facility?

Lastly, you need to understand if your colocation provider operates from a data center which has redundant data policies in hand. This means if their main colocation data center location fails, all of the data stored there has be previously replicated to another data center location across the country and is ready to go at an instants notice. The idea seems simple: if one location fails, a backup location takes its place. It seems simple yet most providers don’t advertise this critical data backup detail.

You need to ask about it.

Categories: Colocation

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