What does colocation do for me?

I've heard the questions before; what does colocation do for me? Why don't I just get into the AWS, Azure or X Cloud? Well... first we have to establish the meaning of cloud. For some people it's having their data in a place they don't know exactly where it is, for other people or companies it's having their servers in a secure location with connectivity that is accessible 24x7. So a lot of people have different views on the "cloud". So lets say that cloud means anything off-permise from the companies building.

No we've cleared this up; what's next? Why would I prefer colocation above any other solution? My simple answer is: you shouldn't. You need to look into your companies network/server structure and honestly look at a few things:

1) Which problem am I solving when I go to a datacenter for colocation?

Of course, when you make a decision to get your servers into a datacenter, you want it to solve a problem. This might be that you don't want to have to worry about network, power outages or support on those servers. So make a list for yourself and write down what you expect when you place your servers in a datacenter and find the provider that will handle all these demands for you. There's a great marked for Managed Service Providers like HostSlim to migrate companies to their own network so that the companies can focus on what they do best instead of trying to run around managing servers.

2) Am I reducing costs?

Most of the time companies are afraid that datacenters are expensive and that's just a lack of knowledge on the business owners or the business owners are being misinformed by their system operator who's afraid to lose his job. Most companies will reduce costs by placing their servers in a datacenter. Most of the time your power consumption will go down and you don't have to pay for cooling. Your power consumption will go down because datacenters are optimized to host servers and most company buildings are not. Which means the heat will increase which causes servers to consume even more power, or hardware components will break down due to the heat, which will cause high replacements costs and downtime. All in all Colocation will reduce costs for most companies.

3) Do I want my data to be in a secure location?

Most system engineers who work at your company will try to tell you that it's insecure to host at a datacenter for XYZ reason. This is wrong. Datacenters like HostSlim are ISO certified, which means they operate by strict norms on who's accessing the datacenters and who's getting near any hardware. This is way more secure than a simple office building where you have different kind of people walking around who are not technical at all, and the building themselves are not as secure as datacenters. Besides, office buildings mostly just have one IP Transit provider which will cause huge issues when they experience downtime. In a datacenter like HostSlim you will have a mix of IP Transit providers + DDoS protection. Office buildings don't have DDoS protection as it's a very expensive solution for just one company.

As you can see there are more "pro's" than "cons" to have your servers in a secure datacenter. Would you like us to explain to you what we can do for you in your particular case? Be sure to reach out to us here: https://www.hostslim.eu/contact/ we would love to help you.