Colocation vs Cloud Hosting

The model of on-premise servers is quickly falling out of favour. Today, more and more businesses are moving the servers that power their business off-site either through Colocation or cloud hosting. But what are the differences between these two models, and which one is right for your business?

Colocation vs Cloud Hosting

With both colocation and cloud hosting, you are able to affordably store your data on servers that are kept at a more ideal location than you would otherwise have access to.

The key difference between colocation and cloud hosting is that with cloud hosting the responsibility for purchasing and maintaining the servers that store your data falls to the cloud hosting or cloud storage provider rather than your business. This means that cloud hosting could save you a lot of money by negating the need for you to purchase your own servers and negating the need for you to have employees in place who are able to keep those servers secured and maintained.

Cloud hosting also makes it much easier for you to scale your infrastructure. Since your cloud hosting provider will already have all of the necessary hardware in place for you to scale your infrastructure up or down as you please, scaling your infrastructure as your business grows or otherwise changes can be done at a moment’s notice when you make use of cloud hosting.

However, colocation offers a few considerable benefits as well. For one, if you already own all of the necessary hardware and already have the employees in place to maintain it, colocation might end up being the more affordable of the two options.

Colocation also gives you a much greater degree of control over the servers that store your data and allows you to retain complete ownership of your infrastructure.

Lastly, If you aren’t ready to fully migrate to the cloud, colocation can be a beneficial first step that allows you to enjoy many of the same advantages that cloud hosting offers without completely overhauling your existing model.

Both colocation and cloud hosting offers a number of unique advantages, and the debate over colocation vs cloud hosting ultimately comes down to the individual requirements of your business.

Given the key differences between colocation and cloud hosting, though, chances are that one is going to provide a better solution than the other depending on what you are looking to achieve, so be sure to take the time to carefully compare and contrast both options.

However, regardless of whether you choose colocation or cloud hosting you’ll almost certainly be able to enjoy more benefits than you would if you stored your servers on-premise.