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.
Why Choose An Atlanta Data Center For Colocation?
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.
We’d like to look at some of the reasons businesses choose an Atlanta data center for colocation, and why we chose Atlanta for our data center and headquarters.
Choosing The Right Location For Colocation
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.
Using Colocated Hardware For Your Private Cloud
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.
What Can You Expect From Your Colocation Provider?
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.
Cloud Vs Colocation: When On-Prem Becomes A Bottleneck
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.
For all but the largest of companies — those that need to house tens of thousands of servers in multiple locations — it rarely makes economic sense to build an in-house data center. Companies that specialize in building and managing data centers can do it cheaper, more securely, and more reliably.
When Is Colocation Less Expensive Than The Cloud?
There’s a persistent myth in among executives in startups and even established businesses that cloud platforms invariably work out less expensive than colocated or hosted dedicated servers. For some types of workloads, that’s true. But for the majority of infrastructure hosting scenarios, colocated hardware has a lower total cost of ownership.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons experienced companies choose to colocate.
Machine Learning Is Better On Bare Metal
It may seem hard to believe, but, not so long ago, gathering enough data to provide useful insights was a difficult problem. Today, many businesses have more data than they can deal with. It arrives in enormous volume from customer interactions, social media, sensors, and numerous other sources.
Machine learning — the application of algorithms and systems that can spot patterns and insights in data — helps companies sift through their data for valuable insights. The major benefit of machine learning is that analysts don’t have to know which patterns in the data are useful; they don’t have to tell the machine exactly what to look for.
What Is Colocation?
The modern server and infrastructure hosting space presents endless options for businesses to negotiate. From dedicated servers, to cloud servers, to platform-as-a-service, to on-premises solutions — and all their marketing-driven disguises. Each has advantages and disadvantages, and no single infrastructure hosting solution fits every need.
There is, however, one option flexible enough to used by companies ranging from the smallest to the largest with an enormous diversity of requirements. Colocation is chosen by businesses that care deeply about having complete control over their servers without compromising on availability, performance, and security.
DDoS Protection Is Vital For Online Businesses
The worst thing that can happen to an online business is losing it ability to connect with its customers. There’s a calculable dollar cost for every second customers can’t load the business’ site, contact it by email or instant chat, or use a service they’ve paid for. Sales are lost and disgruntled users turn to competitors.
Distributed Denial of Service attacks bombard a target network with huge amounts of data — so much data that the interface and the servers connected to it can’t cope with the load and become unable to service authentic requests.
DDoS attacks have always been a problem for online businesses. But in the last few years the frequency and volume of DDoS attacks has increased enormously.