Advantages of Managed Colocation for Small Businesses

Managed colocation has considerable advantages for small businesses, including affordability and specialized customer service.

You´ve just decided to take your small business online and are faced with a bevy of choices. How should the site be designed? What products should be sold on there? And where will you store all the internet servers? The answer the last question at least is an easy one: at a managed colocation center. While it may seem tempting to try and manage your internet servers yourself from your own office, the expertise, space, and effort it takes is really not worth it. Housing your internet servers at a managed colocation center will help save you money, protect your website, and maintain control over your own server.

A colocation center, sometimes referred to a data center, is a company that offers to house, monitor, and maintain your internet servers in their own physical space. Colocation centers house servers from multiple companies, yet keep them all separate from each other. The colocation center does not own any of the servers or server racks it houses, as everything is owned by their client companies.

One of the greatest advantages to having your internet servers located at a colocation center is the fact that they take care of server crisis management. Colocation centers prepare for contingency situations by having backup sources of power and also, for additional fees, maintaining backups of your server data. Colocation centers also prepare against potential emergency situations by keeping your servers in environmentally controlled rooms that are fireproof and flood proof. Not many small businesses have server storage space that can match this protection.

Another great advantage for small business owners who move their servers to a colocation site is the reduced need for professional IT staff. While it is advisable to keep one technology professional on call, the staff at the colocation center will tend to all the responsibilities your in house IT staff would. For example, they will handle server security, data protection and recovery, and network administration. In these tough economic times, bringing several technology employees into your organization can make the difference between a year in the green and a year in the red.

One of the best things about a small business is that you never know when it will succeed to the point of becoming a midsized business, or even a large business. Managed colocation hosting of your servers is essential for being prepared for future growth as there is always room for you to physically increase your internet infrastructure. Colocation companies can always make room for additional servers and server racks in their warehouses, and the tech support you need for your expanded network will organically grow without you needing to hire more employees.

While one of the criticisms of managed colocation is that the bill varies from month to month based on the cost of operations, no one can dispute the fact that it is cheaper than the alternative: hosting the servers yourself. Hosting internet servers yourself not only requires a significant amount of room and expertise to maintain, it also means a lot of worry and anxiety on your part. Are you prepared for a power failure? What about an electrical surge or a server overheating? As a small business owner, the last thing you need to be worrying about is if your website is up and running today. So do yourself a favor and take advantage of the myriad benefits offered by colocation services. Place your servers in the hands of experts so your mind is free to focus on expansion, quality, and of course, profit.