Colocation refers to housing your servers and devices in a professional data center in order to access advanced infrastructure, greater bandwidth, lower latency, constant security and additional advantages. A colocation data center provides the building, cooling equipment, bandwidth, power, and physical security to the  ustomer’s servers and storage.

These datacenters have very large facilities yet they consume a minimal amount of power. They offer colocation services to the client companies and are configured to allow secure client access to private servers. They provide server cabinets and cages,connecting to the internet service providers network, physical infrastructure and also monitor server status. The cabinets and cages are locked with security systems and are inaccessible to other clients.

Various organizations use colocation services to obtain business continuity, scalability and minimal network latency at a fraction of the cost it takes to accomplish the same things in a private datacenter. Yet at the same time the organization can maintain complete control over the physical server, the operating system and the applications.

Here are some of the benefits of server colocation:

Cost effective:

The biggest advantage is the low cost of colocation services. The facilities provided by the colocation data centers are too expensive if the clients purchase them on their own. Colocation centers provide higher bandwidth speeds at nominal costs.

Environmental control

The colocation centers controls the internal environment such as the appropriate temparature, cooling and humidity which is not possible for the clients to maintain at their own premises.

Ownership

The client company owns the server machinery. If at any time equipment is required to upgrade, one can easily upgrade the server without relying on the service provider.

Maintenance

Some colocation datacenters offers the clients to manage and maintain their servers and equipment at an extra cost. This is very useful for the clients who don’t have a technical team or they have their office too far from the colocation center.

Fire control

The colocation datacenters provides the fire control systems which protects the clients equipment from any such condition.

Power Supply

It provides complete power backups by using the power generators and uninterrupted power supplies thereby reducing the risk of data loss or downtimes.

Bandwidth

It gives the client large capacity of bandwidth and better redundancy for network connections. It also provide technical services such as central data storage, backups, and firewall protection at reasonable costs.

Physical security

Security of the equipment is the major issue if you place your server at some other location. The colocation centers provides with physical security such as fingerprint and password entry and video monitoring for surveillance. Despite of all these advantages the colocation datacenters are not available everywhere. I  you don’t live in a large city or a major IT habitat or if your office is located in a semi urban area it is difficult to find a colocation center near you. Moreover the colocation services are more expensive than basic web hosting and the physical access to your server is difficult.