The quality of colocation providers and colocation data centers varies enormously, from companies that will house your infrastructure in a world-class data center they own and manage to fly-by-night operators who can’t guarantee great service no matter what their marketing might say. If your company has decided to host its hardware in a colocation data center, you should take the time to comprehensively research prospective providers before taking the leap.
To help you out, we’ve compiled a list of the five most important questions to keep in mind before you commit your hardware to a colocation provider.
In some sections of the IT media, cloud native applications are a big deal. What that actually means is somewhat hazy, as you might expect of a term trumpeted by consulting firms. But in a nutshell, cloud native applications are applications built to use containers and open source software, using known good patterns like “containers are cattle, and not pets,” and hosted in such a way that developers can focus on development, rather than infrastructure. 
Before choosing an infrastructure hosting platform, it’s important to understand both the qualities of the infrastructure and the demands your application will make of it. In today’s infrastructure space, it’s particularly important to balance the specific benefits of cloud platforms and bare metal. The cloud’s strength is scalability. Whatever other benefits a cloud platform might offer, the ability to quickly deploy virtual servers to meet demand is its raison d’être. 
Servers cost money to buy, power, cool, and house. It’s in the interest of businesses to deploy only the servers they need, and to avoid deploying or maintaining servers that are no longer useful. So it’s natural to assume that when servers aren’t being used, they’re repurposed or retired. In an ideal world that might be true, but the reality is quite different. 
When you’re in the colocation business, you hear the following story all the time. A couple of smart entrepreneurs found a startup. They’re looking for low-cost, agile infrastructure so they launch their first servers on a cloud platform. The cloud lets them get up and running quickly. They launch more cloud servers as the amount of data they need to store and process grows. 
Atlanta is known internationally for many things: Coca-Cola, the Atlanta Braves, Southern hospitality, and incredible music, but over the last couple of decades The City in a Forest has established a reputation in an entirely different area: as a globally renowned tech hub and the data center location of choice for thousands of businesses.
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.
A private cloud is a single-tenant cloud platform. On public cloud platforms, the underlying physical layer is shared between multiple users. Public cloud is a useful and popular modality, but there are many reasons an enterprise organization might prefer private infrastructure. 
Colocation is the hosting of your hardware in a data center managed by a third-party data center provider. Unlike many forms of infrastructure hosting, you don’t lease the hardware from the data center provider. You choose and purchase the servers and other equipment you want to host, and your colocation provider houses them and provides you with bandwidth and the other resources you need. 
In the life of any successful company, there comes a time to expand IT infrastructure to accommodate increased demand. In 2017, companies that once would have chosen to build on-premises are looking for alternative solutions as they outgrow their existing data centers.