Choosing a colocation provider is a strategic decision that can significantly impact your business’s IT performance, security, and scalability. With so many options available, it’s essential to understand what to look for and which questions to ask to ensure you’re making the best choice for your needs.

What to Look for in a Colocation Provider

Not all colocation providers are created equal. When evaluating your options, focus on providers that align with your business goals, growth plans, and compliance requirements. Key factors to consider include:

• Security – Look for providers that offer comprehensive physical and digital security measures. These should include 24/7 surveillance, biometric access controls, fire suppression systems, and robust cybersecurity protocols.
• Uptime Guarantees – Downtime can be costly and damaging to your reputation. Ensure your provider offers a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with at least a 99.99% uptime guarantee and has redundant power and cooling systems in place.
• Network Connectivity – Strong, low-latency, and redundant network connections are crucial for performance. Choose a provider with multiple network carriers, direct peering options, and scalable bandwidth.
• Support and Monitoring – Even if you manage your own hardware, responsive support is vital. Opt for providers with 24/7 support teams, remote hands services, and real-time monitoring capabilities.

Questions to Ask Before Committing to a Contract

Before signing on the dotted line, make sure you get clear answers to the following:

• What are your physical and network security protocols?
• What is your uptime history and SLA?
• Can you provide details on your redundancy for power, cooling, and connectivity?
• What support services do you offer, and are they included in the price?
• Are there any additional or hidden fees for power usage, bandwidth, or remote hands?
• What scalability options are available as our needs grow?
• How do you handle maintenance windows and downtime communication?

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Avoiding these common pitfalls can save your business time, money, and frustration:

• Prioritizing Cost Over Quality – Choosing the cheapest option can lead to poor performance, security issues, and unreliable service. Balance cost with the quality of infrastructure and support.
• Ignoring the SLA Fine Print – Always review the SLA carefully. Vague guarantees and lack of transparency around downtime and penalties can indicate unreliable service.
• Overlooking Future Growth – Choose a provider that can grow with your business. Limited scalability can hinder expansion and force a costly migration later on.
• Not Visiting the Facility – If possible, schedule a site visit. Seeing the data center firsthand gives you a better sense of its security, cleanliness, and operational standards.

Choosing the right colocation provider is about more than finding a place to house your servers. It’s about building a partnership that supports your business’s operational needs, security requirements, and growth goals. By focusing on essential features, asking the right questions, and avoiding common pitfalls, you’ll be well-equipped to select a provider that delivers reliability, performance, and peace of mind.

As technology continues to evolve, small businesses must make strategic decisions about their IT infrastructure. While in-house server hosting may seem like a viable option, it presents numerous challenges that can hinder growth and efficiency. Colocation services provide a cost-effective, secure, and scalable alternative that allows businesses to focus on what they do best.

The Challenges of In-House Server Hosting

Many small businesses start with on-premises server hosting, but as they grow, they encounter several obstacles:

• High Upfront and Maintenance Costs – Purchasing, upgrading, and maintaining servers requires significant capital and ongoing expenses for power, cooling, and IT staff.
• Security Risks – On-premises infrastructure is vulnerable to cyber threats, physical damage, and theft without enterprise-level security measures.
• Reliability and Downtime Concerns – Without redundant power and network systems, businesses risk outages that can disrupt operations and lead to lost revenue.
• Scalability Limitations – Expanding IT capacity requires additional space, equipment, and expertise, making it difficult to scale efficiently.

The Benefits of Colocation for Small Businesses

Colocation services address these challenges by providing a professional, high-performance environment for IT infrastructure. Key benefits include:

• Cost Efficiency – By colocating servers in a data center, businesses can reduce capital expenditures while benefiting from shared infrastructure costs. This results in lower energy bills, reduced IT staffing needs, and predictable monthly expenses.
• Enhanced Security – Colocation providers offer state-of-the-art security, including 24/7 monitoring, biometric access controls, and fire suppression systems, ensuring data remains protected from cyber threats and physical disasters.
• Improved Uptime and Reliability – With redundant power supplies, cooling systems, and network connectivity, colocation facilities ensure high availability and minimal downtime, keeping businesses online and operational at all times.

How Small Businesses Can Leverage Colocation for Scalability

One of the biggest advantages of colocation is its ability to grow alongside a business. Small businesses can start with a single rack or cabinet and expand as needed without the financial burden of building their own data center. Additionally, colocation allows businesses to:

• Customize their IT setup – Unlike cloud services, colocation provides full control over hardware and software configurations.
• Expand seamlessly – As computing needs grow, businesses can easily scale up their server space without expensive infrastructure investments.
• Improve IT performance – With access to premium network connectivity and enterprise-grade infrastructure, businesses can enhance efficiency and ensure a superior customer experience.

For small businesses looking to optimize their IT infrastructure in 2025, colocation offers a compelling alternative to in-house server hosting. By reducing costs, enhancing security, and providing a scalable foundation for growth, colocation enables businesses to focus on innovation rather than IT maintenance. As demand for reliable, high-performance infrastructure continues to rise, colocation remains the smart choice for small businesses aiming to stay competitive in an increasingly digital world.

Businesses that have outgrown their server room or small on-premises data center have several infrastructure hosting options to choose from. They can build a bigger data center, they can launch servers on a public cloud platform, or they can colocate their servers in a third-party data center.

None of these options is best in all circumstances, but a private cloud colocated in a world-class data center provides a balance of security, performance, cost control, and flexibility that is hard to beat.

A private cloud is architecturally identical to a public cloud platform. It uses the same virtualization and orchestration technology to provide on-demand server deployment, fast server scaling, and infrastructure automation. But only code and data owned by the owners of the underlying physical servers ever touches their private cloud.

Private cloud vs public cloud

The public cloud may offer improved cost control and increased flexibility compared to traditional server hosting options, but security, compliance, and performance issues make many businesses leery of putting critical infrastructure in the hands of a public cloud vendor, especially in the wake of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, the full impact of which has yet to be seen.

Colocation is inexpensive compared to the building and management of a data center, and it is unlikely that any but the largest of companies has the IT budget to build a data center with the redundancy, connectivity, and economies of scale available to an enterprise colocation provider.

A colocated private cloud provides businesses with a solution that optimizes IT infrastructure along several dimensions. It involves some capital expenditure for servers and associated hardware, but nowhere near as much as building a data center with the capabilities provided by the best colocation data centers.

From the perspective of users within the business, it provides the same flexibility and agility as the public cloud, but without the security risks, compliance difficulties, and performance issues that affect public cloud users. For larger deployments, owned hardware is often less expensive than the public cloud, as companies like DropBox have discovered.

Maximize server utilization

Low utilization is a major cost center for many IT departments. By maintaining control of the infrastructure and virtual server / container orchestration, private cloud users can make sure their infrastructure use is efficient and cost effective. Businesses can optimize infrastructure costs and increase server utilization by leveraging virtualization and orchestration technologies like OpenStack or Kubernetes for containerized applications.
A well managed and utilized private cloud makes considerable demands on the networking and power infrastructure of its host data center. To ensure reliability and availability, private cloud users should select a colocation data center provider capable of meeting their needs.

Cyber Wurx’ Atlanta colocation data center is the ideal venue for private cloud hosting. With service feeds from multiple metro service grids, 10 gigabit capacity on multiply redundant peers, and world-class physical and electronic security. To discuss hosting your private cloud in Cyber Wurx’s enterprise colocation data center, get in touch today.

If you were to design the perfect money-spinning tool for cybercriminals, it would probably look something like a cryptocurrency. There is no need to sell data or credit card numbers, create spurious advertising campaigns, or deal with less-than-honest middlemen to make a buck. All the enterprising criminal has to do is compromise a server, install cryptomining malware, point it at their digital wallet, and wait for the money to come rolling in.

Tesla is the latest high-profile victim of cryptojacking — the use of cryptomining malware to generate coins. The Tesla story is interesting from a number of perspectives that are relevant to colocation clients, not least the technique the attackers used to compromise Tesla’s servers. The attackers used an unsecured Kubernetes console to access credentials for Tesla’s cloud infrastructure, giving them access to sensitive data and the infrastructure on which they ran the cryptomining software.

Businesses are likely to see their security systems come under even greater pressure because of the ease with which cryptomining can be used generate revenue for criminals, the rising value of cryptocurrencies, and the increasing expense of legitimate mining.

A recent survey revealed that cryptomining malware affects 23% of organizations globally, and although cryptomining might seem relatively benign compared to ransomware, the cost in wasted infrastructure and energy are not insignificant (aside from the fact that being infected with cryptomining malware is an obvious indication of infrastructure vulnerability).

There are two main techniques criminals use to mine: they use compromised infrastructure to mine directly, or they use their access to that infrastructure to embed JavaScript mining code in user-facing sites and applications, recruiting both the business and its customers into a distributed mining operation.

The method used to compromise servers is often fairly typical: outdated software, brute force attacks, or supply chain attacks. In this case and several others, the culprit was a woefully insecure Kubernetes installation. Kubernetes is used by many businesses, including colocation clients, to deploy, scale, and manage containerized applications. Much of that management takes place via a web console which isn’t password protected by default.
The first lesson to be learned here is that if you’re using Kubernetes, make sure you have password protected the console. It’s a sure bet that other criminals are trawling the web looking for Kubernetes consoles to take advantage of.

The second lesson is to be careful about where your business stores access credentials for its infrastructure. In the Tesla incident, it was AWS credentials stored in a Kubernetes pod, but there are plenty of other opportunities for authentication credentials and private keys to find their way into publicly accessible systems like GitHub or internet-facing production code.

It might also be worth considering a bug bounty program that incentivizes “researchers” to report any vulnerabilities they discover rather than selling that information or exploiting it themselves.

Last year was not great for IT security. Pick a month at random and you’ll find reports of serious data leaks and security breaches affecting millions of people. The news is biased towards the catastrophic, but with global cybercrime and espionage on the rise, businesses that rely on their online services need to do better.

Part of doing better is becoming more proactive about security and privacy. It is no longer enough to do the minimum to secure network boundaries and deal with security issues as they arise. Security has to become part of the DNA of modern businesses, a core business goal alongside and not subordinate to other goals.

Hosting sensitive data in a secure colocation datacenter instead of a less secure public cloud platform is a step in the right direction, but building secure applications and services requires a commitment to inspiring a culture that prioritizes security and privacy.

Everyone has a part to play

The first step in becoming proactive about security is to realize that your security team and IT staff need help. Those who work in this space have experienced the unnecessarily adversarial relationship that arises between IT and non-technical workers, largely because the workers don’t understand why IT insists on making life difficult for them.

Staff should be trained to understand the threats businesses face and the rationale for security policies. Hiring policies should make security awareness a prerequisite for consideration. Security is easier if everyone is pulling in the right direction.

Bring security into the C-Suite

If your company’s hiring policies are functioning properly, your developers and system administrators know what it takes to build secure systems. But are they given the right incentives by the company’s leadership? Incentives matter. When a company’s executives consistently prioritize productivity at the expense of security and privacy, we get situations like the Equifax leak.

Executives should make security a priority. Managers and project leaders should be incentivized to work towards key security metrics.

Make security a part of the product

In the past, consumers haven’t been particularly concerned about security and privacy. They weren’t factors that influenced consumer behavior. After Equifax, WannaCry, and a dozen other high-profile security lapses, consumers are learning to take security very seriously indeed; it’s becoming a key differentiating factor.

Businesses that make the effort to build secure applications and services will be more attractive to consumers who really don’t want their emails, passwords, and sensitive data leaked to identity thieves and other criminals.

For many businesses, the shift to a security-first approach requires a cultural evolution. But established businesses don’t have a choice: if they are unable to adapt to the demands of a market that includes ubiquitous organized crime and state-sponsored cyber attacks, they will be out-competed by startups that understand the mood of the public.

Modern businesses generate, process, store, and analyze huge quantities of data. In fact, many gather more data than they’ll ever use, stashing it in storage services and servers until a rainy day that never comes. Storage is cheap, so why not store as much data as possible? There is nothing wrong with storing data if it is done consciously, strategically, and with careful oversight, but when data is stored accidentally or without due care and attention, it becomes a security, privacy, and compliance liability.

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On May 28th, the EU will introduce strict new privacy laws. The GDPR (EU General Data Protection Regulation) is intended to increase privacy protection for everyone in the EU, including non-citizens who travel to EU countries. Because the new regulations are so much stricter than the previous EU privacy regime, it’s almost certain that US colocation clients have some work to do before the end of May if they aren’t already prepared.

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Once a business has identified a need for infrastructure, it has a range of options to procure and deploy it. Today, most businesses choose a mix of infrastructure hosting solutions that may include integrated public cloud, on-premises data centers, and colocation deployments — a mix that is usually referred to as a hybrid cloud.

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