Although it’s a bit of a mouthful, the location of your colocation data center is a vital component in the success of your business’ infrastructure strategy. To choose the right colocation data center for your servers, you need to balance several factors, ranging from geographical location to network connectivity. Compromising on any one factor can come back to haunt you in the future — increasing costs, eroding reliability, and limiting the experience you can provide to users.
I’d like to take a look at some of the factors that should be front-of-mind when choosing a colocation facility for your servers, using our Atlanta colocation data center as an example.
Proximity To Your Business
A key benefit of colocation is that you get to select and manage your servers. Rather than choosing a cookie-cutter solution designed to suit the widest possible audience, businesses can build or buy the right mix of infrastructure, install the software that best fits their needs, and manage the servers according to internal security and quality standards.
But to benefit from colocation, you need hands-on access to your hardware, both to maintain it and to respond to any issues that may arise.
The more accessible your colocation data center, the easier it is to manage your equipment, install new equipment, and respond to issues in a timely fashion. No one wants to have to jump on an airplane because their database server is having performance issues.
Our Atlanta colocation data center is located in the heart of downtown Atlanta with efficient transport links to the Atlanta metropolitan area.
Connectivity
Low-latency network connectivity is perhaps even more important than proximity — and it’s important to note that the two aren’t necessarily related.
The best colocation data centers have optimized networks and direct links to backbone providers — less well-equipped data centers can’t offer that sort of connectivity. A small data center half a mile from your business’ offices could well provide slower network connectivity than a more distant, but better connected colocation data center.
The most important factor to consider here is the latency between the data center and your customers. This is less of a concern if your colocated hardware is used to host content that’s pushed out over a content distribution network, but for vital services, application backends, failover servers, and databases, you want the best possible connection.
The best connected data centers are usually those located in close proximity to an Internet Exchange, with redundant bandwidth from several major bandwidth providers.
Our Atlanta colocation data center is close to the Atlanta Internet Exchange district with fibre access to nearby carriers. We’re capable of providing extremely low latency connectivity throughout the Atlanta region and to the rest of the US.