What is Colocation, and what are the benefits to my business?

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For companies that own hardware, but lack the budget or resources for building a complete supporting infrastructure, Colocation services deliver just the right solution, especially when you consider you can get a cheap server on EBAY for as little as $200! You maintain your hardware and software in a datacenter environment that ensures high quality, uninterrupted service.


Colocation is the next step up from your own virtual domain service provided by a hosting company. This allows for greater flexibility in terms of administration and implementation of services, especially when dealing with your own clients. The Charlotte Collocation Center allows you to install your own hardware, enabling you to determine and to justify the hardware required to support your clients/virtual domains. What the Charlotte Collocation Center will supply is bandwidth and the facilities to locate your machine.

A colocation centre (collocation center) ("colo") or carrier hotel is a type of data centre where multiple customers locate network, server and storage gear and interconnect to a variety of telecommunications and other network service provider(s) with a minimum of cost and complexity.
Benefits
• Increased flexibility.
• Better performance because you determine the hardware specs.
• Savings on overall hosting costs.
• Decreased dependence on external customer support services, as most administration and maintenance can be performed through remote administration.
Increasingly, organizations are recognizing the benefits of colocating their mission-critical equipment within a data centre. Colocation is becoming popular because of the time and cost savings a company can realize as result of using shared data centre infrastructure.
Significant benefits of scale (large power and mechanical systems) result in large savings over building infrastructure into your own facility. With IT and communications facilities in safe, secure hands, telecommunications, internet, ASP and content providers, as well as enterprises, enjoy less latency and the freedom to focus on their core business.
Additionally, customers reduce their traffic back-haul costs and free up their internal networks for other uses. Moreover, by outsourcing network traffic to a colocation service provider with greater bandwidth capacity, web site access speeds should improve considerably.
Major types of colocation customers are:
• Web commerce companies, who use the facilities for a safe environment and cost-effective, redundant connections to the Internet
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• Hosting Companies
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• IT Professionals who host customers web applications
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• Major enterprises, who use the facility for disaster avoidance, offsite data backup and business continuity
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• Telecommunication companies, who use the facilities to interexchange traffic with other telecommunications companies and access to potential clients

Charlotte Colocation Center offers solutions for customers who want to deploy a cutting-edge web site or mission-critical application on a dedicated server in the most secure and reliable environment.
When it comes to the web, location of servers is critical. By collocating with the Charlotte Collocation Center your servers will be directly connected to multiple backbone connections and your traffic will get to its destination quickly and efficiently.
Additionally, your server will be provided with a highly secure and controlled environment featuring on site 24 hour, 365 days a year operations and resilient power systems backed by UPS and generator, air conditioning and comprehensive physical security.

The support and maintenance of a mission-critical web site can be both costly and time consuming. This is why the Charlotte Collocation Center provides a complete outsourcing solution through its fully managed collocation services. We will monitor and maintain your web solution leaving you to focus on your business.

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Why would anyone want to colocate when

1) Bandwidth is usually cheaper when you get a leased server;
2) If there's a hardware problem, the ISP takes care of it without cost;
3) Hardware is constantly becoming obsolete, and owning servers means ending up with a bunch of out-of-date hardware (hence the $200 servers on Ebay!)