Submitted by Gaurav K on
Companies sometimes find it difficult to decide between managed hosting and co-location, as they both provide organisation with the ability to move in house IT infrastructure off premises or remove it completely.
Both solutions minimize business’ utility usage and provide much needed cost efficiency. But what is ideal for your business? In order to answer that you have to realize what your specific requirements are, and which workloads you would like to run from one or the other solution.
Before making the final decision you have to understand what managed hosting and data center colocation mean for a business enterprise. This article compares and analyzes both services as suitable options for specific infrastructure needs and outlines some use cases for both.
Managed Hosting - Outsource Your IT Infrastructure
With managed hosting you are procuring dedicated hardware from a hosting service provider as a service. The hosting provider maintains and provides support for managing the hardware within their data center.
The maintenance team relieves you of the need to manage your hardware. As hosting is the provider’s key service their maintenance and support teams are fully capable of addressing any technical issues that might arise. With years of experience it is highly unlikely that any IT deployment you require will pose a challenge that the provider’s teams have not faced and resolved before.
Additional advantage of managed hosting is technology refresh. When you sign up for hosting you no longer have to catch up with the most current technology upgrades or hardware obsolescence, as your provider continually upgrades the systems and servers. You can rest assured that your IT infrastructure keeps pace with your company’s growth plans. As there is no more need to continually invest in maintaining your own IT infrastructure which means that you can free parts of your budget for other capital investments.
Managed hosting also frees your IT team from daily troubleshooting and maintenance and leaving them available to focus on business priorities. This also enables you to reduce manpower costs.
In essence, managed hosting provides you with the expertise and completing SLAs that help your business focus on more strategic issues, while benefiting from cost efficiencies and empowering you to make investments where they are more needed.
Co-location - Outsource And Maintain Control Over Your Hardware
There is no doubt that outsourcing complete IT infrastructure can provide some significant advantages, however depending on your specific business needs, you might need to own, and retain control over your IT infrastructure for certain workloads. This is the case for businesses that provide financial services, or are in industries where the nature of business requires adherence to compliance and regulatory restrictions. It also is more acceptable for companies that have already invested in their own hardware and do not want to give up on that investment yet. For all those scenarios co-location is the perfect solution, as there are no sunk costs.
With Co-location service you can move your hardware off premises to a service provider’s data center. What is great about the co-location is that you choose and purchase your own hardware, own it, control it and maintain it all in the provider’s environment. This solution saves you significant amount that would need to be invested in building your own data center.
As your business expands you can easily add more space, power, bandwidth, and with no capital expenditure it would take to maintain and run your own facility.
Co-location service provides you with the manner to maintain control over your IT asset, while taking advantage of your provider’s expertise in running and operating data centers.
You can also choose additional services from the provider’s elaborate Managed IT service portfolio. Co-location, therefore empowers you to offload maintenance, support, and necessary updates and even supplement your servers with managed storage solutions from your service provider.
Co-location or Managed Hosting - What Is Better For Your Business?
At this point you have an overview of benefits and tradeoffs of both co-location and managed hosting. There are companies that initially choose co-location and later on move to managed hosting when maintaining and updating hardware becomes too demanding.
The decision to choose co-location or managed dedicated hosting depends on your business’s specific needs.
Nowadays, there is also a growing number of companies that find that combination of these services matches their unique mix of workloads, so there is another option to consider a fully customizable Hybrid IT solution.
When estimating the best solution for your organization you can also consult a reliable provider, such as Everdata, that has years of experience providing these services to businesses across all the industries.
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