What are the biggest advantages to colocation?

[Ticaga]

I've never used Colocation however the advantages in my opinion is:
1. It's cheaper than paying to rent a dedicated server, as you own the equipment and just rent the space.
2. You can go to the datacenter to fix anything yourself and don't have to relay on a third party.
3. You don't have the chance of social engineering attacks as you can do the number 2.

 

[OffshoreRacks]

Colocation is very good if you are close to the data center and do not have to rely on remote hands, make sure you have a good inventory of everything on the server, especially SSD/HDD serials/model, access to ipmi/idrac/ilo etc.

 

[SharedGrid]

Colocation is very good if you are close to the data center and do not have to rely on remote hands

Not really a consideration these days, I know plenty of hosts (us included) who have never set foot in their overseas data centres. Kit and spares are shipped half way across the world and fully racked by remote hands.

 

[systeminplace]

Benefits to co-locating your server:

1. You own the hardware and as such you are only paying for space, power, and bandwidth.
2. You can stuff it with as many options as you have the space and power for.
3. You can upgrade at any time and are not limited to what the provider has in stock.
4. Spec to Spec you will generally get much better dollar to profit ratio than leasing the hardware from a datacenter who has to recoup things such as labor, parts and more.
5. You get the perfect system which is custom built to your exact needs. Some DCs can provide this, most will not. And those who do, will do so at a premium.

Cons co-locating vs leasing (even if you are local to the Colo):

1. You better have spare hardware on site or one of the following will happen:
   • You could be potentially be down for days if your PSU, CPU, RAM, MB, DRIVES fail. It is not a matter of if but when it will happen. It could be next month or it could be 10 years away. It WILL happen and datacenters have plenty of spares available on hand for their dedis.
   • You will be at your providers mercy for spare parts if you do not already own them.
   • You will be at your providers mercy for high costs for things such as remote hands.
   • Any downtime events are solely on you as well as any costs involved.
   • Although this is not always the case, the hardware most people Colo is generally not on par reliability wise as those datacenters tend to offer. We tend to see a lot of budget builds in our colocations.
2. Even if you are local, unless you rent an entire cabinet, you will likely not have direct access to your hardware to go on site. For example our Colo cabinets could have upwards of 15-20 colocated customers inside and as such we cant allow one client access to other peoples hardware.

If you DO co-locate your server the following things in my opinion are required:

1. IPMI/iLo/iDRAC for your server. This allows bios level access to fix issues without requiring datacenter or remote hands intervention.
2. Lantronix Spider 2, these can be purchased used on eBay for around $150usd. For the cost I recommend this even if you do have the IPMI access from the previous step.
3. A DUAL PSU system.
4. Spare drives boxes which are pre-packaged and ready to be labeled and shipped to the DC at a moments notice.

And with any system, colocated or leased:
BACKUPS, BACKUPS, BACKUPS.