Co-location vs In-house

The advantages of co-location become clear once you recognize the cost and time delays associated with providing the same services in an existing office or premises.

Costs to allow for

• Server racks for storage of equipment
• UPS capable of supporting machine for at least 15 minutes
• Router to connect to incomming Internet connections.
• Network switch to allow connection of multiple machines
• Firewall to protect network from attacks
• At least two fiber connections to the Internet
• Network monitoring and paging equipment
• Climate control air conditioning system

Delays to allow for

• Allow at least 30 working days for provision or upgrade of Internet connections
• High speed connections might not be available at your location
• Install, configure and load test your equipment

Even when all of these costs and time delays have been allowed for, the chances are your connection to the Internet will be substantially slower than that of a data center's and limited in expansion capacity, you'll need to invest further in new routers if in future you need additional capacity.  Your data will be costing you 50% more because the volume is much lower and worst of all when there's a problem at 3am on a Sunday morning YOU will have to deal with it!

There must be some benefits of having your equipment in-house right? Yes there are, you can access your machine at any time with ease using a keyboard and monitor. A function quite comfortably performed remotely using SSH or one of numerous free remote control packages for Windows.

Is it really worth spending thousands of dollars, losing your weekends and waiting for Internet connections to be installed when you could be up and running on the same day for as little as $242/month? (1RU server with power and Fiber Connection inbound data).