Colocation hosting provides you (and your business) the bandwidth of a large business with a cost only slightly greater than that of a standard, basic web hosting package. With colocation hosting, you buy your own server and lug it down to the actual data center's office, and install it in its"rack" of servers.

Rather than sharing a company's server(s), or even renting a dedicated server from the same data center, with colocation hosting, you actually own the hardware, while still enjoying the many resources of a large, established data center. Such benefits include: controlled air temperature and humidity, building security (from fire, flood, theft, etc.), redundancy, backup systems, and the support of the company's IT and management team on hand. But you alone are responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of your server; the colocation hosting provider only handles things like connectivity, environmental factors, uninterruptible power, and security.

To many programmers, though, this is ideal, allowing the flexibility to determine what software and what hardware you will be using, with the peace of mind of knowing certain crucial (and expensive) elements of web hosting are still being taken care of for you

Colocation is really all about control: you control the extra services you can offer your clients that a regular hosting package (even with a dedicated server) might not allow, such as a VPN, colocated server space, or a dedicated server; you control what components are added/subtracted and when; you control how much bandwidth (within a certain range) each of your servers gets, rather than a fixed percentage of your overall bandwidth allotment; you control your own router, firewall, and VLAN.

A colocation hosting provider, as with other web hosting providers, can either be a standalone outfit (in this case, a data center), a third-party company that rents server space from a data center, or a colocation web hosting reseller.

Paul Hoffmann

Senior Director Cloud & Technology Solutions, Ingram Micro

Posted on March 8, 2010

Doug,

Just to help expand on the answer. Colocation is simply when a service provider sells you space in a datacenter (theirs or someone elses). The space can be a cage, a rack or a shelf in a rack (i.e. part of a rack). The service provider takes care of all the infrastructure (network connectivity, power, physical security, etc.). Typically, then if you bought a server, you could place it in the colocation facility.

A step beyond this is dedicated server hosting. This is available in a few flavors. Some offer root access dedicated hosting. With this, you basically have a colocation server with the service provider providing and maintaining the hardware. Once it is setup, aside from what comes with the server, all the software and configuration is your responsibility. The other option is managed server hosting in which the provider takes care of the software/application environment.

Rarely is dedicated server colocation better for business. The cost to set your business up with sufficient redundancy to ensure that you don't have server/site interruptions is very high.

-1

Marina Arnaout

Posted on July 6, 2010

The bottom line is that server collocation results in cost cutting. I suggest browsing around Atum's website for more information or a free 30 day trial.

http://www.atum.com