What to expect with Colocation?

I wanted to write this article to give a bit more in-depth information on colocation and what you should expect when choosing for colocation. What are the roadblocks? What are the opportunities? I want you to be able to make a calculated decision.

Costs or savings?

So probably the most asked question I get in the beginning is: will it be more expensive to place my servers in your datacenter than to lease them? The answer really depends on a few things. 1) How many servers do you have? 2) How much Bandwidth do those servers use? 3) Do you want to have your own Whitelabel Network? 4) Do you have spare hardware parts 5) Costs of server lease.

What this means is that most people that lease server do this for a few reasons. Mostly it's to reduce initial hardware costs, reduce costs on replacement hardware and to reduce costs on remote hands services when they're not near the datacenter. So it really depends on how many servers you have. For some people with 1 server leasing is fine, but if they want to start their own network and have everything in complete control without having to depend on outside-people to manage their hardware and infrastructure, then colocation is fine for as little as one server. You should calculate for yourself what it will cost to colocate your hardware vs leasing hardware from a provider. Both have pros and cons. For leasing the pro is low startup costs and for colocation the biggest pro is full control over your hardware.

Remote hands or remote management?

When you have chosen for colocation you need to make sure you have made up your mind about either managing the servers yourself (24x7 access card) and via IPMI/ILO/IDRAC remote management. Most servers these days have some kind of remote management software as standard, so that really helps. In case of hardware replacement you need to make some agreements with your colocation provider on what they calculate for remote hands. We have seen a wide range of remote hands pricing starting at 30 euro up to 300 euro per remote hands. So it really is important to have a clear agreement with your colocation provider for these costs so you don't have any surprises.

Racking service

Some datacenters, like us, offer a free racking service. This means that we will mount/rack your servers for free in our datacenter. This really helps in lowering your initial startup costs and we offer it as nice gesture. If your datacenter does not offer a racking service and you are not near the datacenter; then it would be wise to look for a company that will rack the servers for you for a fixed fee. Again, for a fixed fee as that really helps against "strange" surprises on the bills :-)

24x7 access

Most datacenter will grant you 24x7 access to your equipment. This is really important because in case of emergency you want to be able to get access to your hardware even when it's 3AM. Unless, of course, you have a managed agreement with your colocation provider that says that they will go to the datacenter in these cases. This is mostly called an SLA (Service Level Agreement) and comes at a premium.

Investing in hardware

As stated earlier in this article, when you are going to colocate hardware your initial investment will be the hardware. For most hardware their "financial" lifecycle is 36 months and their "technical" lifecycle is around 60 months. So you you need to find out if it works better for you to buy new hardware each 5 years or to simply lease your servers and upgrade whenever you like. In that case your provider covers the initial costs of the hardware and you simply pay a monthly "rent" fee.

Growth

Usually when you rent colocation on a large scale it's cheaper to grow than with leasing servers. Mostly because leasing servers comes at a premium in comparison of having your own hardware in your colocation rack. You pay X amount for your rackspace and bandwidth, which is usually lower than a monthly bare metal server bill. Besides there are some great hardware financing options in The Netherlands. You can always contact us to help you out with this. We have some great hardware finance partners that would love to help you out and keep your costs low and your cashflow positive.

If you are by any chance looking for colocation; be sure to check our our colocation plans here: https://www.hostslim.eu/colocation/

We offer colocation from 1 Unit up to private suites.

Thank you for reading this article.

Ralph Karseboom

Director HostSlim

www.hostslim.eu