More and more businesses are choosing to relocate their company servers and network equipment out of on-site server rooms and instead are opting for third-party hosting solutions.

Companies of all sizes choose colocation as a strategy because it delivers three major benefits, you get the benefits of the Cloud, along with the performance and security of having your servers and infrastructure.

What is Colocation?

To sum up colocation for you, it’s when you utilize a data center to house your servers. This could be one server 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, let’s look at the top 3 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 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 is needed to run a generator or battery backup in case your office encounters a power failure. 

Power is just one example to use, but we’ve 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 a redundant network, bandwidth pricing, or the amount you must 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 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 forget about cooling, batteries, and a plethora of other options you will need to run your IT department. 

Expanding your business often means you need to find more space to house your growing team. 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 is 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 by a faulty network cable to a full-scale DDoS attack. When an attack or faulty cable goes down, your entire business can become crippled. How will you send the email? Is your site still online? Can you communicate with your customers? Most people only worry about these types of things when they can no longer use them, however, as a business owner, you do not have that luxury. 

You must 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, what if you’re not a fully qualified network engineer? Will you know all 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.

TurnKey Colocation

Listed above are just 3 great reasons why colocation may be an option for your business. It will help streamline your business and provide you with a piece of mind that your IT department is being handled by professionals. 

TurnKey Colocation is the ideal solution for companies, service providers, small businesses, and IT resellers who want a stable environment in which to completely control their assets. When utilizing our state-of-the-art data center you can control your hardware, software, and networking to your needs without worrying about the supporting infrastructure. In doing so, you will immediately recognize tremendous savings while also getting peace of mind that your equipment is hosted in a 100% sustainable, green, and SSAE-18 audited, secure facility. 

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.

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In the late 80s /early 90s times where starting to change, this wonderful technology era we live in now was just beginning. Businesses now, need to be online in order to stay competitive and grow with this new age.

Like most business a Server Room was built, in a spare room or space in your office or home and today now resembles a pile of mis-colored wires that you could spend days trying to untangle. You purchased equipment that easily fit into your budget, and your team was able to configure the networking without any troubles. This setup was the same in all business across the board. In the beginning of this era, you could get away with this. There was no thought of cooling systems or ventilation. No notion of backup power systems, or any real working order was to be found in your Server Room.

Once again, the era of technology has changed. Businesses need their operations to run with super speeds, be secure, maintained, monitored, and most of all be redundant. The terms Server Room and Data Center could once be used interchangeably, no longer can they now.

A Server Room can be any room, in any building that houses servers. Whereas a Data Center, is a whole building designed to support and provide a secure, power protected, environmentally controlled space, used for accommodating servers, networking, and computer equipment.

 

Some of the key points to a Data Center, a Server Room does not have.

Security and Monitoring:

Most Server Rooms do not have a high volume of security. Besides the buildings overall security, there may be a lock on the Server Room door.

Data Centers pride themselves in the security features they offer. All entrances and exits are secured with a key coded entry system, as well as alarms. Not just alarms for entry. Alarms for temperature control, air pressure, fire / water control, ect. All Data Centers have network cameras, accessible to their staff and security team in a needed event. The cores / racks the servers are housed in are all locked. Only opened when your team needs to visit or by the Data Center staff, if needed.

Connectivity:

What good is your server if you have a fixed bandwidth rate? Most Server Rooms are capped off by their ISP as they are using a residential internet service.

Data Centers do not use any type of residential internet service and most times are able to set the bandwidth limits as they are needed by the server.

Redundancy:

If there is a power failure at your business, do you have a backup power plan? Most Server Rooms run from the same power source, as the full office. Making your sites and servers go down if there is ever a power failure.

Data Centers have a plan for any type of failure. When it comes to power failures, most Data Centers have battery backups, automatically triggered if the main power supply is not responding. When the system sees the backup batteries are being utilized, another backup power source is engaged, the generator.   At this point the battery backups turn off and all power is controlled by the generator until normal power is restored.

Affordability:

With a Server Room, you are accumulating all the costs that go along with it.  You may have had to cut advertising short or possibly even lay off good employees as the costs to maintain and house your equipment have risen. At a Data Center all those costs are tied into your package and at a much, much lower cost.

 

Environment:

Datacenters control the cooling and humidity – to a precise and perfect level to keep your equipment running as long as possible.  Storing equipment in non-conditioned environmental space like your server room or office closet will shorten the life of your equipment significantly (meaning it will cost you real money to replace broken equipment sooner).  Electronics are sensitive to things like electrical and static shock, which occur due to improper humidity (moisture) and you can even find corrosion on the electronics in some poor environmental conditions.  Its crucial if you have valuable equipment to store it in a properly humidified and cooled location like a datacenter.

 

Green (going Green):

Some modern datacenters, like TurnKey Internet’s Green Datacenter , offer one additional benefit ontop of everything above.  Your IT equipment and servers consume less energy in terms of cooling and power draw in a modern green-focused datacenter – and in TurnKey Internet’s datacenter your equipment consumes energy provided by only by the Sun (on-site solar array) and Water (Hydro power) providing zero carbon foot prints for your IT infrastructure versus having it at your office.

 

Our offices do not look anything like they did 20 years ago. Our businesses are not what they were 20 years ago. Most companies have employees living all around the world, remoting in for work. Your administrative staff is no longer dependent on white out, typewriters, and filing cabinets. You attend conferences and meetings by using a phone, tablet, or even your watch. The majority of your business is conducted over email and most of your sales are placed through your website. In order to keep up with these growing times, we now need to ditch the Server Room and head to the Data Center.

 

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