Pro and Cons of Colocation Hosting
5 Advantages and 4 Disadvantages

• Advantages of colocation hosting.

1.) The cost and amount of bandwidth your business will enjoy is much less on a comparable basis with other hosting packages. For example, a low cost limited bandwidth business grade DSL line generally costs around $150 to $200.

For the same price or less a single server can be placed in a collocation facility that provides higher bandwidth speeds and better redundancy for the network connections.

2.) Better outage protection. Mother Nature has and will always be full of surprises, you never know when the next calamity will be on its way to render your area without power for a few day.

The colocation facility is able to pool resources in order to buy more powerful and more expensive equipments that can run for a longer duration. At a colocation provider, you will be paying for power generators and backup power to protect against such occurrences.

3.) Full ownership. In colocation hosting you own the server and therefore have full control on its usage. If for any reason you decide that the machine is too slow or don’t like the amount of memory, you don’t have to wait for your host to do something; you can simply sell it or upgrade the server to a better one.

4.) More Control. Colocation hosting provides you with more control on the server usage that the other hosting plans. Because you own the server software you have full control to install the software or tools that you will want to use.

5.) Security. Your server is stored and maintained in a secured environment. Colocation providers provide additional security for your machines.

Although we all strive to make the world a better place by having better products and services, we are still from the ideal. One should consider the pro and cons of colocation hosting before making your decision.

• Disadvantages of colocation hosting.

1.) Can be more expensive than basic Web hosting. There is need to maintain and manage your servers, you can either hire an IT technician or pay your host provider to help out, this will cost money. Time after time you will need to upgrade the server or buy new software to for efficient functioning of the server.

2.) It is Hard to find an ideal colocation host providers. You will want to have collocation hosting facility that is geographical proximal to your place of business for fast and easy maintenance or a hosting facility that’s close to your target demographic/market for optimal connection speeds. It becomes hard to get one that can serve both needs.

3.) Relocation. This is like going back to square zero, start shopping for a new hosing facility. If you move out of the area where your colocation provider is, you have to either move your servers to a new provider or leave them there and pay for a maintenance contract.

4.) No fixed monthly cost. One of the factors in the monthly rate of collocating a server is the amount of data transferred via the server in the monthly period; this can easily lead to unpredictable fluctuating prices depending on the amount of traffic your site will receive.

Finally as I have already pointed above before choosing colocation hosting, Care should be taken to weigh the pro and cons of colocation hosting. But remember colocation hosting is really about how much control you want.