Choosing Collocation for Your Traffic-Intensive Site
When you start building bigger, it´s absolutely imperative that you scale up your infrastructure accordingly. You wouldn't try to run a fleet of taxis without getting auto insurance. Obviously, if you want your site to be successful, it must be reliable, and the redundant services that top quality collocation provides are essential. Of course, if your site is large enough you may go the way of Google and yahoo, build your own data-centers. However, because data centers can cost millions to build, usually all but the largest sites choose collocation.
When you´re shopping for a data center, there are several factors to consider. You´ll want to know how strongly certified the data center has been. Tier four data centers are held to the highest standards. You will want to know what technologies are used to manage inventory, heating, cooling, bandwidth, power needs, and you´ll want to take a close look at the services offered at the data center you´re considering. The location of the data center may be of interest to you as well; the best collocation sites are relatively protected from natural disasters.
When you do you setup with the collocation site, do your best to plan for flexibility, and make sure you structure according to the future growth you expect. If the best collocation sites are far away from your company, you may want to consider how much you will need to be physically present to do the work your servers need. Some data centers offer twenty-four seven support, where technicians will reboot machines, plug in displays, or even switch out hard drives or servers from one location to the next. When these services are available, you need only to make a phone call or electronic request, which can make it feasible to collocate in great data centers even if they are far away.