Choosing a colocation is no less than choosing a business partner. You need to be assured of the commitment, the transparency of operations and last but not least, a long lasting dedication to the vision.

Housing your mission-critical business application at someone else's facility is a big decision and needs a careful discretion and long term planning. You may want to be 100% certain that your infra partner in terms of colocation services is something you can trust 24x7.

Some of the salient features of a stellar colocation service are:

1.     Physical location of the colocation service

Location is one of the most important factors to consider. All other parameters are dependent heavily on the choice of location. While assessing the location of a colocation service, you need to consider in which area is the service physically located and how far it is from your company. The idea is how easily it would be for you to manage in terms of any routine upgrade, or service your equipment or any new installations. It doesn’t have to be in your city, but most probably in your own country.  The other important factor to consider is if the colocation service area has belts of natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and tornadoes. The last factor to consider is the ecosystem and if there is adequate arrangement of power supply to ensure continuous operations.

2.     Flexibility and Expansion Capability of the services

It basically points to how scalable are the services to your growing operations. How customized the services bundling is. How the customized service model is going to affect your Capex and OpEX. You may want to ensure that your service partner has the capability to cater to your growing business demands together with a competitive pricing.

3. Reliability of service

The reliability is measured as uptime in the world of data centers.A service can only be reliable most of the times.  A reliable provider should have five 9s uptime, meaning they are reliable at least 99.999% of the time. One of the ways to ensure a trusted reliability is to check any customer feedback if available.

4. Ease of deployment of services

How fast can you push your services on the environment with long delay and disruptions in the services? How one can cross-connect or add an additional rackspace on demand as in the demands in business dynamic and scale up anytime!The answer lies in the efficacy to deliver with high scalability and minimum disruption. Make sure you have clear timelines when it comes to pushing up the scalability and transition of your services demand.

5. Network Ecosystem

Seamless network connectivity is the backbone of colocation services and rest all would be meaningless without it. It’s like a gun without bullets. In fact the biggest advantage of colocation lies in the ability to network with partners, distributors or even competitors for peering with low latency. To ensure a thorough check, you may want to ensure if the facility is carrier-neutral and if the colocation service provider has a decent enough ecosystem of customers already interconnecting with each other that is a clear sign of trusted services.

Choosing a colocation center is thus a critical issue and you may also want to ensure the financial stability of your service provider before committing your years of vision as a partnership with your vendor. Ideally your data center should be able to support you for at least 5 years if not longer. It would also matter how many other vendors are there around the same location to have an assessment of the market of colocation services in the area.

Choosing a colocation is a major step in shaping your IT and thus business strategy to eliminate the expense of building or upgrading your own facility. Thus to choose your colocation data center wisely, you may want to evaluate various vendors in terms of service costs, connectivity and service-level agreements.