Whether you are a small business owner and looking to host simple employee applications virtually, or want to deploy an IT infrastructure for billions of consumer transactions, choosing the best colocation hosting providers is an essential need for every business.
Today’s colocation hosting facilities vary according to the requirement of every small or medium-sized business. They offer highly customizable colocation solutions to fulfill the needs of startups and established businesses. The services also provide a complete service level agreements (SLAs) that allow users to perfectly address their networking, power and backup needs, to meet the redundancy, access advanced disaster recovery capabilities, and cater to every need the business is looking for.
With a great array of options today, it is difficult to choose the right option. So Grid hosting professionals can offer numerous considerations that can help you make the best decision before choosing the cheapest colocation in the UK.
Before proceeding further, first, it’s important to understand what colocation is.
What is a colocation service? Who are the best colocation hosting providers?
Colocation is basically a practice of renting out space for your server other than your premises. The service just acts as a ‘carrier hotel’ where space, bandwidth, network, computing hardware, and other equipment will be hosted by third-party colocation service providers, and the place where they host the server is called a data center.
However, a user is required to pay monthly to fulfill their collocating needs without even expecting any additional charges. In the case of the best colocation hosting providers, there are a lot of choices out there; but the reliable one is probably the one who offers maximum uptime guarantees, complete customer support, and cost-effective packages. Grid hosting guarantees all such attributes with a proper disaster recovery plan that can help you run the operations smoothly without any troubling situations.
Considerations for the best colocation hosting providers:
Here are some top considerations that can help you select good services near you.
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Location matters the most:
Companies tend to find data centers in some particular geographical areas, especially they try to find a reliable colocation facility close to their IT team. That’s the reason if you are in need to choose a colocation service provider, it is best to look around and see if you can find someone reliable than choosing a facility that is far away from your office or house.
Besides the nearest location, make sure the colocation services are existing in a popular town and provide the cooling facility, geothermal energy, or power backup solution. The company operating in some unpopular place may not be a good choice as they are lacking advanced colocation technologies.
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High connectivity:
Most of the data centers in the UK are operating around telecommunications hubs that can simply maximize your carrier diversity for proper convenience, reliability, flexibility, redundancy and other factors, with the addition of available bandwidth. The users should simply evaluate whether the data center facility is integrated with both the locations and customer organizations.
It is also much essential to ensure that the data center service provider can deliver high-end networking capabilities according to your business needs.
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Tier classification:
Another important thing is to assess the data center tier requirement. This tier classification system simply accounts for some high uptime requirements, power redundancies, backup, and power protection. The Tier I services might be more suitable for a warehouse type of business, while Tier IV looks like an enterprise-ready solution and committed to offering 99.9% uptime, no technical failures, backup facility, advanced infrastructure, and over 95-hour power outage protection.
Physical security by UK colocation providers:
Physical security is one of the major concerns for both potential customers and colocation service providers. Before choosing the service, it is recommended to consider a vast range of security features:
- Follow perimeter security which includes fencing or different barriers that limit ingress and egress, scanners, metal detectors, and 24 hours empowered guard stations.
- A building should be impermeable along with highly advanced structural design, like reinforced walls, protection of walls and roof, the security of vent, as well as a windowless environment.
- A data center should have a security monitoring solution along with amazing coverage of the facility.
- It should have various access barriers that can provide your server a room to include mantraps that say, “One person allowed at a time”, biometric access, authorization, fingerprint access as well as retinal scans. It’s also important to maintain several access logs
Backup and disaster recovery solutions:
Backup and recovery is another major area where colocation hosting services can offer a lot of amazing advantages. Many services offer disturbed and various mirrored facilities that result in automatic failover in case of a power outage. The reliable services offer great protection against a lot of natural incidents, like a flood, hurricanes or earthquakes, and also different technical failures. It’s better to check out their service level agreements and see if they have highlighted any downtime during failover. Also, analyze the whole process and restoration timing to offer more valuable results.
Maintenance flexibilities by colocation services:
In the case of colocation hosting solutions, internal team and management staff are required to gain complete access to your server, networking equipment, hardware, and storage solutions in the facility. There are a lot of organizations that tend to work with their desired maintenance service providers and requiring great access to the colocation hosting environment.
If you want such access to the hosting facility, it’s better to check out the entire authorization details and access system, especially if they are offering any kind of limitations or restrictions like who can work on the site, when to work at the site and who can access the specific elements on the website.
Every small business organization has some specific requirements and budget boundaries, so they want a company that can fulfill their hosting needs reliably and cost-effectively. Therefore, before choosing the colocation hosting providers, it is better to analyze the features and benefits carefully. Grid Hosting can help you offer exceptional colocation solutions according to your business requirements and suggest something more useful for reliable outcomes.
