We are thinking about getting into the colocation game, so here is a brief article we wrote up on the topic.
Some people in the hosting industry look at collocation as a dirty word? Why does collocation hosting have such a bad rap? Well, first let us take a look at what collocation hosting is really about.
At its core this means that the provisioning of space, bandwidth and power is controlled by a third-party data center. They do not control it all though. Most of the time, the web host who is using the third-party’s data center services will need to provide the management for the hardware or servers they are running from there.
To try to make sense of this, lets say I want to start a store. I go rent a building downtown that has all the shelves, cash registers, and shopping carts – however I have to stock the store myself and, of course, figure out a way to bring the customers in the door. Instead of spending money on buying the store and some of the basic necessities, I get to rent them – in turn bringing my overall costs down.
So, with it explained like that – where is the evil in it?
Well, many web hosting elite look down upon this practice because it is a money saving practice. It lowers the proverbial bar on the point of entry somebody has to become a web host too.
Since building a data center from the ground up is a very expensive and time consuming act, I see no problem in getting your hosting through collocation.
