If you’ve ever heard the term “Data Centre Colocation” and nodded along without really knowing what it meant, you’re not alone.
In simple terms, colocation means housing your own servers and IT equipment in a professional data centre, rather than in a cupboard under the stairs at your office (yes, we’ve seen this) or in an expensive public cloud environment.
You still own your hardware. You still control your systems. What changes is where it all lives.
Why does that matter?
Running servers in house sounds simple enough until the air conditioning fails on the hottest day of the year, or the power flickers during a storm, or someone in the office trips over a cable that really should have been better labelled. A data centre is built to remove these risks entirely, with proper power redundancy, cooling, physical security and connectivity that most offices simply can’t match.
Public cloud, meanwhile, promises to solve all this for you, and often does, right up until the bill arrives. Costs can creep up quietly, and you lose a fair bit of control along the way.
Colocation sits neatly between the two. You get the security and resilience of a purpose built facility, along with predictable costs and full control over your own kit.
What do you actually get with colocation?
At its core, you’re renting secure space (anything from a single server to a full private suite), reliable power, cooling and internet connectivity, all wrapped up with physical security that a typical office building won’t offer.
Many providers, ourselves included, also offer remote hands support. So if something needs a reboot at 2am, you don’t need to drive there yourself in your pyjamas.
Is it right for you?
If your business relies on servers, whether for websites, applications or internal systems, and you’re finding that in house hosting is becoming a headache, or your cloud costs are climbing faster than you’d like, colocation is well worth a look.
It gives you the stability of a professionally managed environment, without giving up ownership of your systems.
At Vinters Connect, we’ve built our facility in Maidstone, Kent around exactly this idea: clarity, control and infrastructure that just works. If you’d like to know more, would like a tour of our facilities, please get in touch.