Those in the hosting business will most likely know what we mean when we say the word ‘colocation’. In case you are not yet familiar, colocation services are when you rent data center space for your own equipment that you have purchased. The data center will provide you floor space (including or excluding racks), power, and cooling.
The more advanced a data center is, the better the services it provides. Traditional ‘old-fashioned’ data centers only offer floor space in a large open hall without optimizing airflows. Newer data centers go one step further and use warm and cold isles to separate the cool intake air from the warm exhaust air.
What About Power?
Power is an important component to consider. Relying on a single power source for your equipment can increase the risk of an outage. To reduce the risk of downtime, modern data centers will provide redundant power sources, each backed by a UPS and (diesel) generator.
‘Public’ Network For Colocation
If you go shopping for data center space, you will (most likely) also need internet connectivity, preferably from multiple providers for redundancy.
With most data center providers, you are responsible for arranging your own internet connectivity. This means you do not only need to get a contract with several carriers or telecom providers, but you also need to arrange your own public IP’s, AS-number, configure BGP peering, etc. All of these ‘extras’ require quite a bit of knowledge from your engineers.
Other colocation providers offer network services that remove the burden of managing the internet connectivity yourself. These companies provide you with uplinks to your platform where they take care of the routing, have contracts with multiple carriers, and offer 24/7 support. You no longer need to have the deep understanding required to figure out how this complex part of the puzzle works, allowing you to focus more on the core of your business.
Getting Support
When you have placed your own equipment in a data center, you are not always around to do hardware replacements or onsite troubleshooting. Because of this, with many data centers you can hire ‘remote hands’, which is basically an engineer in the data center available for any tasks you need help with. More advanced remote hands engineers can also help you with troubleshooting 24/7.
Leaseweb Colocation, Cloud Connect & More
We offer colocation services in almost all of our data centers for very competitive prices. When choosing Leaseweb, you will gain access to the best data centers with high security, power, and connectivity as well as our excellent remote hands support.
We provide your racks with our world-class internet connectivity in our Standard colocation package, or choose your own carriers with our Pure Colocation product). View all Leaseweb colocation packages here or see an overview of our two colocation options below.
| Standard Colocation | Pure Colocation | |
| State-of-art data centers | X | X |
| Diverse rack sizes | X | X |
| Optional extra’s like PDU’s, network switches | X | X |
| Different power consumptions options | X | X |
| Internet connectivity from Leaseweb | X | – |
| Choose your own carrier | – | X |
| Remote Hands | X | X |
| Connect to other Leaseweb services via Private Networking | X | X |
A new product we recently announced is Leaseweb Cloud Connect, allowing you to connect your colocation equipment directly to the Leaseweb Private Network. This means you can connect directly and securely to Leaseweb-leased servers or to the cloud in the same data center. Now, colocation customers can run their base workloads on their own equipment and scale out to the cloud.
And what about reducing your CAPEX costs? If your hardware is getting to the end of its (commercial) life, why not do a controlled migration to an OPEX model by replacing your old hardware with new leased servers that will be in the same network, thus minimizing the risks?
To view all of our colocation solutions, visit our website or contact Peter at p.lonis@nl.leaseweb.com to learn more.