Situation: You’re a small to medium sized business that handles all your IT needs internally. This means you have a dedicated onsite IT staff, a dedicated space for your exchange and telephony servers, maybe a dedicated space for your web hosting server and hopefully, a dedicated power supply. But here’s the thing – your internal colocation or hosting solutions are annoyingly expensive and are more of a headache than you care to admit.
With this in mind, we present you with five tips for finding the best colocation solutions for your needs.
1. Research Multiple Colocation Providers At Once
It’s a silly thing to say but just as if you were looking for a house, when investing in managed services solutions like colocation, don’t limit your search to a single colocation provider. Look at multiple providers at the same time. Compare prices, tech specs, power specs, disaster recovery options, collocation bandwidth prices and data center security details. Just like a house, investing in collocation solutions requires multiple avenues of approach.
2. Know Your Server Needs
How much bandwidth, RAM, Disk Space and CPU cores does your server or your servers need? Do you know the number? You should. Before you invest in data center solutions and dedicated server solutions, you need to know the exact tech needs of your onsite server. Without this information at hand, you’re search for colocation solutions will be fruitless. Know the resource needs of your server(s).
3. Power, Power, Power
This tip will be short and sweet. When it comes to looking for reliable managed hosting solutions housed in a data center, the one thing you need to be certain of is power supply to your servers. It goes without saying, but when looking for colocation hosting solutions, you need to invest in a data center provider who has access to tiered levels (main, auxiliary, back up) of energy supply. The last thing you want is for your server to experience downtime issues because the colocation data center you selected continues to have power outages. Power is important.
4. Location and Fail Safe Backups
This is an issue with server colocation that isn’t talked about enough. Disaster recovery is based upon fail-safe data replication and the physical location of your provider’s backup data center. Point in case, when Hurricane Sandy slammed into New York City, a ton of data centers located in lower Manhattan lost power due to water inundation. These providers, unless they had backup data centers located in a different geographical region off of the same power grid, were offline for days/weeks. For the customer, this downtime caused nearly $8 billion in lost revenues. Moral of the story: when investing in colocation solutions, invest in a provider who has multiple data centers, fail safe redundant data backups and a location which is outside of a flood plain or earthquake prone zone.
5. Bandwidth is King
One of the main reasons companies of all sizes invest in colocation services and data center solutions is the price of bandwidth. Colocation offers cheap bandwidth rates. Just like you need to know your server spec needs (RAM, Disk Space, CPU Cores) before you shop around for data center providers, you also need to know how much bandwidth your servers and websites need to properly operate. Additionally you need to have an idea of your peak hour bandwidth usage so when you purchase your colocation resources, your server doesn’t exceed allotted bandwidth limits.
So there it is. Five simple steps to finding the best colocation service you can. Research multiple providers at once. Know your server needs. Power, power, power. Disaster Recovery options are important and bandwidth is king. If you use these tips, we promise you that your hosting solutions and managed services solutions dreams will come true.