A Few Different Types Of Collocation Packages

It's very often suitable to rent a number of dedicated servers to suit a hosting requirement. Colocation can on the other save businesses money due to the costs associated with renting the hardware. Colocation means you pay for the hardware up front, but long term you save by just renting rackspace and bandwidth. So what colocation packages can you buy? We are going to look at them from top to bottom.

If you wanted the most expensive colocation package, you'd fit out an entire datacentre. With this, you would need a highly sophisticated team to manage power, bandwidth and cooling requirements- not forgetting security. For the vast majority of businesses, this obviously isn't practical. A datacentre can have thousands of racks over multiple floors, to half a dozen racks in a purpose fitted comms room.

If a datacentre doesn't fit your budget, you can always consider a private cage or suite. A cage or suite is a private enclosure in a datacentre where you host your own racks. The benefits of this is that you are separated from other customers racks.

You might consider renting individual racks if a cage is too much. The standard rack offers up to around 16amps of power and 40U of rack space. You'll normally fit around 30 servers in this rack. Because of the green lobby concern for the environment and the every increasing cost of power, servers are becoming more and more power efficient. Racks are fully secured- locked back and front which gives piece of mind that you are isolated in your very own private space.

If you are looking at only a few servers, then a full rack might be practical and you might consider a quarter or half lockable racks. Half and quarter lockable racks offers security at a fraction of the cost of a full rack. Quarter and half lockable racks often share the same power with other racks. Make sure you have your own power feed for peace of mind.

Lockable racks might be a little over the top if you only have one or two servers. Don't worry though, there is a simple colo package for you. There are companies that offer shared rackspace for individual servers. From a 4U down to a 1U server, you have plenty of flexibility. Most reputable colocation providers will only allowed supervised access to shared racks- but do be sure to check this out before signing up with a colocation provider. Remember though, with a shared colocation package- the power and bandwidth is shared with other users.

As you can see, there is plenty of flexibility in collocation. It doesn't matter whatever your requirement, whether small or large, you should find a suitable colo package for you business.