Colocation : Leveraging the Benefits of The Cloud

Have you ever heard of colocation? Did you know it is a GREAT way to grow your business?. You get the benefits of the Cloud, along with the performance and security of having your own servers and infrastructure. To sum up colocation for you, it’s when you utilize a data center to house your servers. This could be one server all the way up to a full rack of servers. Here at TurnKey Internet, we have several clients who lease several racks from us that house their entire IT department and infrastructure.

Now that you know what colocation is, lets take a look at some of the key benefits that it can provide to your business:

A predictable expenditure model

When you have a small to medium size business, chances are you can’t afford to spend large quantities of money on your IT infrastructure. This could be everything from hiring a full-time IT engineer, to setting up your own network infrastructure. The prices you would pay could exceed what you have budgeted for your business. For example, one of the most expensive items with owning a data center or housing your IT department will be the power. The power that each server uses. The power to keep the servers running 24×7. The power needed to run a generator or battery backup in case your office encounters a power failure. Power is just one example to use, but I used power to show that you may not know the amount per month you will be spending on just power alone. Factor in setting up redundant network, bandwidth pricing or the amount you have to pay your IT engineer to keep it running and your business could be looking at well over six figures.

This is where a major benefit of colocation stems from. You can sign up for a colocation contract at TurnKey Internet and receive one flat rate for all of those items. Your bill per month would be predictable as you would know each month how much you’re going to be paying to run your IT department. Colocation takes a lot of the variability out of the equation

Better access to space and power

Does your office or business currently have enough space within it to run your IT department? Keep in mind that you will need ample space for the servers themselves. You will also need room to bring power into your business to run the servers. Don’t forgot about cooling, batteries and a plethora of other options you will need to run your IT department. Do you currently have enough space in your business for those services? If not, colocation could be a great option, as all you would need to do is send your servers to the data center. They will take care of spacing and power needs. You wouldn’t have to worry about your office overheating from 20 servers running and not enough room to disperse the heat. You could also include this under cooling.

Network connectivity

One of the biggest costs in running your IT department in house are the costs associated with keeping your network at 100%. This may seem like common sense since you’re running a business on the internet, but are you aware of how often your network can lose connectivity? This can be caused from a faulty network cable all the way to a full scale DDoS attack. When an attack or faulty cable goes down, you entire business can become crippled. How will you send email? Is your site still online? Can you communicate with your customers? Most people only worry about these type of things when they can no longer use them, however, as a business owner, you do not have that luxury. You have to stay on top of your network to ensure that you’re able to connect with your customers and vice versa. While yes, you could do this yourself, but what if you’re not a fully qualified network engineer? Will you know all of the items you will need to keep your network secure and stable? This is where colocation comes into play. Since you’re paying a fee to colocate your server, network connectivity is taken care of for you. Highly qualified network engineers will constantly monitor your network for any connectivity issues and remedy them should the need arise providing you with peace of mind

Listed above are just 3 GREAT reasons that colocation may be an option for your business. It will help streamline your business and provide you with piece of mind that your IT department is being handled by professionals. You can see our current colocation offers at: turnkeyinternet.net/colocation

While this is by no means an all inclusive list of the benefits of colocation, it should at least provide you with a starting point to determine if colocation is right for your business.