Hosting, colocation, data center, so many words, and it becomes way too confusing real fast. For any new business that wants to expand, these words can cause big confusion. Luckily, it is not that hard to catch up with all of these words that mean quite big things. A data center is a physical location for your servers, it is like you are renting a place for the servers. Colocation is a service that manages your servers that are located inside a data center.
I know right, why is it called a colocation if it is a service and not a place? Pretty weird, but moving on to the final word, hosting. Hosting is the combination of having a data center and using colocation to manage those servers. It all makes a bit more sense now, you can either have the pieces individually or both of them, but from different businesses. You need this segregation because both of these jobs are pretty important if you want them to go smoothly.
Up-to-date tech
In order to choose the correct hosting solution, you need to take a look at their tech. The logic is pretty simple, a low latency network for finance and any kind of trading or online businesses is a must. You can not trade or have proper communication if there is a lag slowing the process. Higher latency leads to more technical problems, frustration, and thus more mistakes. You can not risk making mistakes if there is a pretty simple solution to it.
Updated tech is also much more user-friendly than older generation tech. It is always a mess when you want to store something on the server and it becomes an unpleasant task. Or, if you need to change up something on the server, you really want to do it as quickly as possible. Accessing the servers remotely through a phone app is also very integral to today’s standards. It is very important to check out these features before making the big switch to hosting.
Eco-friendly tech
A room with constant cooling and supplying a bunch of electricity does not do that for free. These kinds of server rooms require a lot of electricity to work and thus have a certain ecological footprint. This is why if you brand your business as eco-friendly, you also need to worry about this parameter. If you want to adhere to your ideals, you need to host in locations that use renewable energy.
There are a lot of options out there that provide you with green electricity. If you are already hosting somewhere without green electricity, you can strike a deal to implement it. It is like you are renting any kind of property, you can still make changes to it if you make a deal. Solar panels are now more affordable than ever and installing a few of them will go a long way.
Security
As tech evolves, so do the tactics of cybercriminals evolve. It is a never-ending game of cat and mouse where tech can be used for both good and bad things. This is why you need to know how the security holds up where you are hosting. This means both physical security and cyber security, need to be impeccable. Physical security can sometimes be dismissed because the main focus is on cyber security, but never forget about it.
What good does cyber security have if anyone can walk into a server room and do harm? Cyber security needs to be top tier no matter if you are a small or big business owner. Small business owners tend to oversee this thinking they can not be a target when there are bigger fish out there. Truth be told, this way of thinking is known to cyber criminals, and thus some purposefully target small businesses.
Customer support
When choosing a hosting solution, customer support should also be your top priority. If an error occurs, and they always occur, you want someone who can help you ASAP. Your colocation team needs to be there to assist you in dire times no matter the time of the day or night. Checking out their customer support quality will ensure they got your back.
Besides their hasty work, the work also needs to be top quality. This means helping you out and achieving it, not just talking into an empty void without any clear words. That is the worst part, getting customer support that responds fast but fails to give you any further instructions. This is why you need to know that your colocation team gets everything covered in a professional manner.
Your unique business
Every business is unique, and thus your hosting and colocation solutions must comply with your business. It is always much more worth finding someone who knows your business than just being the #1 rated. This is why talking to these teams in full detail is always important before signing any deals. If someone does not want to go into further detail about your cooperation, that is a red flag that you should avoid.
Any kind of hosting or colocation business will be more than glad to talk to you and listen to your requests. This means good businesses, not the ones that try to sell you empty stories without any follow-up once money is in their hands. The prime businesses are the ones that admit that the job can be quite hard or that they are not the ones that can help you. The ones that encourage you to seek someplace else if they do not think they are right for you.
With everything figured out, you can see that choosing the right solutions for hosting is not hard. It is very important for any business seeking to expand to choose its options wisely. There are many of these businesses out there, but you can narrow down the choices with these tips. Once you narrow down the choice, the conversations will do the rest of the job.
These tech solutions are not the future, because they are already here in the present among us. By choosing your tech solutions wisely, you will be able to get an upper hand compared to your competition. With this upper hand, you can grow and thus make something truly great for this world to awe in wonder.