If you are new to colocation or web hosting, before you invest your money into a colocation company like RackSpace or Hivelocity, you need to take some time to understand what type of colocation server your business colocation plans need.
Knowing what type of colocation server your businesses needs for your web hosting needs means understanding three details: server scalability, server resources and server pricing.
How to Choose a Server For Colocation Scalability
Here’s the thing, as a company you are in the business of making money. Every company, regardless of industry, is in the business of making money – more specifically, making more money then they did the year hence. This means, your business is in the business of growth.
Growth. When it comes to colocation, growth means everything. Colocation server growth means your data center colocation provider has the space and the services available to allow your company to scale your IT needs as your company makes more money and grows to new heights.
Growth. The best way to choose a server for colocation is to choose the server you need now and the servers you will need later. This is to say, understand your current colocation needs (how much bandwidth, CPU, Memory, Disk) while also understanding that those server colocation needs will grow in the future. Growth with a server colocation provider is about scalability on both your end and your providers end. It means moving from 1U server colocation to a full rack of colocation servers.
Pick a server for your current needs first. Then, pick colocation web servers for you future scaling needs.
Choosing Colocation Servers From Tech and Resources
Now comes the technical side of the matter. If you aren’t new to colocation and web hosting or if you are more of the technically inclined, you might go about choosing your colocation servers by the type of server your colocation host offers. Instead of choosing your colocation provider by amount of server space they offer (see the above colocation scalability section), you could choose your web hosting provider by the type of server they supply.
Point in case, does your possible web hosting solution provider supply you with Core i5 Ivy Bridge servers or do they supply you with Core i7 Ivy Bridges? Are the colocation servers your host provides running in Supermicro server boards? Does your data center provider offer Xeon E3 chips?
For the technically inclined, understanding what type of colocation server your provider offers is very important. Again, server colocation is first and foremost about matching your needs to your provider’s capabilities. If you need a certain type of colocation server to handle specific demands and loads, make sure to understand the colocation servers you are leasing.
Choosing Colocation Servers Based on Price
We won’t get too deep into this topic as we have already talked about it in numerous blog posts. However, before you invest in colocation, understand that different data center colocation solution providers will charge different amounts for the same services. This pricing difference will depend on the area you are collocating from along with the price of power and how much space colocation providers have to lease in their data center.
Server colocation prices fluctuate by provider and region. Understand this. Don’t fight it!
So, how should you choose a server to match your colocation needs? Understand server data center colocation scalability, understand data center colocation web server technical specifications and understand the price of colocation varies depending on provider and area.
Now, go get your hands on some solid web hosting gear.