Setting up a server or minicomputer can be extremely expensive, even for those who just plan on hosting a single site. That’s why an increasingly large percentage of the industry is moving toward the use of colocation servers. By migrating all your data to a place that’s shared with other people, you can share costs with multiple agents all working on their own behalf. This can help to amortize the price of running the equipment, which has made this an especially popular option among small business owners.
IT professionals have long suggested that those who join a colocation program actually get less network bandwidth as a result. While this may have been true at one point, modern colocation data centers are highly efficient and leverage the power of fiber optic network connections. This gives them the ability to process a large number of communications channels simultaneously. In many cases, a colocation data center can actually handle incoming requests faster than a traditional server ever could.
Those who want to do processor intensive work, such as sophisticated statistical analysis, can even use a colocation server as a place to store information in the cloud while they’re not working on it. All of the heavy lifting could be done by a local machine that takes advantage of the fact that it can send information back and forth quickly over the wire. In theory, the server could potentially even process more data than a local storage device could. It could certainly hold much more.
