At the end of 2019, the worldwide hosting market was a little over $56 billion. Forecasts show that figure surpassing $171 billion by 2027.
The hosting market is growing because so many companies are moving their operations to the cloud. If you’re one of those companies and you’re wondering how dedicated and colocation servers compare, read on to learn more.
What Is a Dedicated Server?
There are several options for web hosting accounts — shared, virtual private servers (VPS), and dedicated servers.
Shared and VPS both share a single server between several users. The users are independent of one another but each one only gets a percentage of the processing capacity, memory, storage, and bandwidth the server is capable of.
A dedicated server is exactly what it sounds like — all its resources are dedicated to your use. Nobody else is sharing the server unless you choose to share its resources.
What Is Colocation?
Colocation means placing a server that you own in a data center belonging to a hosting provider. Rather than renting a server from them, you provide the hardware, and they provide the infrastructure to connect it to the internet and keep it running.
Colocation providers offer per-unit mounts or quarter, half, and full rack colocation. What is full rack colocation? It means you have an entire server rack to yourself, giving you space to add more hardware. Quarter, half, and per-unit colocation mean you only get a portion of the rack space.
Why You Should Work With a Hosting Provider
The alternative to having a dedicated server or a colocated server in a data center is hosting it in-house. While this gives you more immediate access to the server, your infrastructure likely doesn’t meet the standards of a typical data center.
They offer security, bandwidth, power backups, and various other things that are prohibitively expensive for the average company.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Dedicated vs. Colocation Servers
Renting a dedicated server and colocating one of your own each has its pros and cons. Neither one is always the “best” solution.
Renting a dedicated server means you don’t have to buy any hardware. There’s no up-front capital cost and you can budget for a fixed monthly fee. You can also scale your server as your needs grow by migrating onto a more powerful machine.
The biggest disadvantage to dedicated hosting is that you can’t customize the server to exactly the specs you want. You’ll have to choose from whatever options the hosting provider offers.
Choosing a colocation server, you control the hardware so you can customize it exactly the way you want. You can also choose the location of the data center it’s hosted in, giving you more flexibility for geographic needs such as regulatory restrictions like HIPAA compliance.
Either option gives you access to the provider’s infrastructure so you can customize your bandwidth and port size to suit your needs.
Do Your Research to Determine Which is Best for You
When you’re comparing dedicated and colocation servers, do a cost and benefit analysis before making a decision. You might find that the extra up-front cost of colocation costs less in the long run but a cheaper dedicated server could suit your needs just fine.
Be sure to check out the rest of our site for more helpful articles about getting the most out of modern technology.