Financial considerations regarding colocation
When choosing a data center to colocate your servers in, it is important to check the colocation providers financial situation and consider how reliable they are. Colocation is a costly business and should it happen that the provider runs in to financial problems or goes bankrupt it can have serious consequences for your business.
In case the power or connectivity is turned off, your servers will become unavailable and unless you have planned for disaster recovery with a secondary backup data center your business will most likely be damaged. It obviously depends on what kind of business you are in and what the servers in colocation are used for, but on the short term clients could be unable to find you and do business with you while in the long term it could damage your reputation due to your site(s) and/or services being unavailable.
Furthermore if the colocation provider is filing for bankruptcy and all the assets are being held back in the bankruptcy estate, you might be unable to get your servers and more importantly data until the attorney handling the case has an overview of the colocation business. He obviously needs to validate that the servers are actually owned by you and not an asset owned by the bankruptcy estate, usable for improving the financial situation for the creditors. In such a situation you could risk having to purchase new equipment and set up from a backup at a new colocation data center if the process takes too long.
Therefore make sure to raise the topic of financial stability with the colocation data center before signing a contract, to see how they respond to it and how they feel about their own financial situation and if they have taken any measures to ensure that things keep on running and that you can get your servers and data in case problems should occur.
Going with a large provider with a good reputation and perhaps even several data centers is therefore often worth considering. Checking for business and data center certifications is also a smart thing to do, as it often is a good signal if the data center is SAS 70 audited, tier 4 certified, PCI compliant or has taken other measures of that kind. Make sure to google the provider and check industry forums and blogs to see if there are any bad reviews, outages or other negative things about the company you are considering using.
Colocation providers can easily be found via tools such as Data Center Map, where you can search for colocation data centers.
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Blogs about the data center industry and colocation at the Data Center Map blog. |
