What is Colocation Hosting?
Just as shared hosting can be compared to apartment living, there’s an easy analogy that may help in understanding colocation hosting. Imagine you own a recreational vehicle (RV). When you want use it, you rent a spot in an RV park where you can use the park’s utility hook-ups (such as electricity) for the duration of your stay. The RV park provides the spaces, and keeps the grounds, but you are, of course, responsible for maintaining your RV.
Now, replace RV with server, and RV park with data center, and you have a pretty good approximation of colocation hosting. Just like that RV, you can take your server with you wherever you go (on permanent moves—it’s not portable the way a laptop or tablet is), as long as you can find a nearby data center where you can rent rack space.
How Does Colocation Hosting Work?
If you’ve decided to own a server rather than selecting a standard hosting plan from a hosting provider, you need a place where your server can be stored and run.
Technically, it is possible to run a server from your home. But unless you have enough bandwidth for the server to perform at optimal levels, a home-based server may be more of a hindrance than a good hosting solution. Also, some Internet service providers (ISPs) may refuse service for home-based servers, or you may find the plans that will accommodate a home-based server to be cost-prohibitive.
By owning your server and renting space in a data center, you can rest assured that the bandwidth will be sufficient, and while you’ll still have the charge for renting that space, it may actually be lower than what your ISP would charge you to have your server at home. So rather than paying for hosting service, you’ll be paying to rent server rack space, and share the data center’s broadband, as well as a few other amenities.
It’s important to remember that most of the time with colocation hosting, you are only renting the data center space. Because you own the server itself, you are responsible for its upkeep and maintenance, as well as performing any upgrades or repairs that may become necessary.
Reasons to Own Your Server
You may have never considered owning a server when it seems so much easier to sign up for traditional hosting, and maybe opt for dedicated server hosting from an established hosting provider. People decide to own servers for many reasons, including but not limited to:
- Ability to custom-configure the server to your specifications rather than using a vendor’s standard build
- Option to use an operating system possibly not offered by other hosting providers (Solaris SPARC, AIEX pSeries, HPUX, etc.)
- Ability to create an unusual configuration or install specialized hardware for an unusual application such as cryptography, graphics processing, etc.
- Ability to control the build and feel secure that it was both done correctly, and is secure
It’s possible that while you do prefer to own your server, you’d rather not have to worry about maintaining it. It’s also possible that the data center that offers colocation hosting nearest to you is an inconvenient distance away. If your server goes down in the middle of the night, you don’t want to have to drive an hour to fix it. Managed colocation hosting may be the solution in those cases.
Managed Colocation Hosting
It’s everything you get from colocation hosting—the operating system and hardware control—but without the headache of worrying about server maintenance. Managed colocation hosting is, justifiably, more expensive than standard colocation hosting, but if it saves you time, and increases the efficiency of your business, it may be a cost-effective and worthwhile solution.
How to Set up Colocation Hosting
If you own a server, you must first configure it your liking. This basically means installing an operating system and applications in order to host your site. Once your server is configured the way you want it, you’ll need to find a data center that offers server space.
Depending on where you live, a data center that offers rack space may be difficult to find. And if you do find one, space may be very limited. If this is the case—and this is just a possibility in general as well—you can also rent a server from a data center rather than owning one.
Renting a server will still allow you to make custom configurations, but should you ever decide to move to a location that makes traveling to the data center prohibitive, you’ll lose that server and configuration, and will have to start over with a new server in your new location.
Once you’ve found a colocation data center, you’ll install and set up your server in the provided rack space. When your server is up and running, the data center will connect to your server, and provide it with bandwidth and an IP address. You will then be able to access your server pretty much the same way you would access a website through traditional hosting.
How to Choose Colocation Hosting
Choosing colocation hosting, or rather, a data center in which to install your server, comes down to a few basic concerns:
- Location of the data center
- Physical security in the data center
- Data center environment (interior temperature, fans, etc., to keep hardware from overheating)
- Availability of backup power (in case of power outages)
- Cost
If you opt for managed colocation hosting, those basic concerns still apply, although cost may become a more prominent factor in that case.
Colocation Hosting Features
Colocation hosting features differ from standard hosting features in that they are more physically oriented rather than software-based. Good colocation hosting will offer features including, but not limited to:
- Security such as locking cabinets and/or cages for your hardware; cameras; motion detectors; key-card access; possibly security personnel
- 24-hour access to your server
- Technical services (at added cost) if you are unable to visit the data center yourself
- 24-hour network monitoring to ensure uptime
Colocation Hosting Disadvantages
While colocation hosting does offer a long list of benefits, it can also have some disadvantages, including, but not limited to:
- Colocation hosting providers may be difficult to find, especially if you live far from a metropolitan area
- If the data center is far from you, traveling there may be difficult or inconvenient
- It may be more expensive than traditional Web hosting (unless having more control over your hardware is a worthwhile trade-off for you)
- Pricing fluctuations, which can be good as you only pay for the actual amount of data transferred via the server, but bad if you have traffic spikes and get larger-than-anticipated bills, which can make business budgeting a challenge
- You may encounter bandwidth limitations, or be charged extra fees if you go over your specified bandwidth usage*
*It’s not uncommon for hosting providers to offer “unlimited” features—email accounts, disk space, bandwidth, data transfer, storage, etc. However, these features are only unlimited insofar as your usage does not put an unreasonable burden on shared resources, and you do not abuse these “unlimited” features.
Colocation hosting is not for everyone, and shouldn’t be considered a feasible alternative to shared hosting, or even VPS or dedicated server hosting. It requires an entirely different skill set—the knowledge to configure a server, the ability to maintain or repair it, and the time to manage it properly.
Of course, some of this can be alleviate through managed colocation hosting, but think carefully before you buy or build your own server. Make sure it’s not only a cost-effective choice, but a manageable one.