Why risk your business in a house of straw when you can share a castle?

What is Colocation?

Colocation refers to the practice of situating one’s servers in a professional data centre in order to access economies of scale, advanced infrastructure, greater bandwidth, lower latency, specialist services and systems, constant security, and a whole host of additional advantages.

As technologies become increasingly more extensive and sophisticated, the option of constructing a proprietary, private environment ‘from scratch’ becomes (except perhaps for the very biggest online businesses) commercially and practically absurd.

Modern data centres are very large facilities – the new PEER 1 Hosting data centre located in Portsmouth, UK has a floor area of 5,372m², delivering 11 MVA of power. And yet it's IT infrastructure consumes a minimal amount of power, thanks to a free air cooling system that would be beyond the means of any single enterprise.

Greater resilience to disaster and to malicious attack. Huge savings available in cost and time and the sheer convenience of an environment in which every conceivable service is immediately on hand – it all adds up to an irrefutable argument for Colocation as the best strategy for 99% of today's businesses.

What are Colocation Services?

Colocation services are offered by data centres equipped and configured to allow secure client access to private servers. Colocation services include leasing server cabinets and cages, connecting to the ISP's network and physical infrastructure, and monitoring server status. Each cabinet and cage is securely locked and inaccessible to other colocation clients. Hardware is administered by the client without any ISP involvement, except manual server restarts upon request. Some ISPs offer additional professional services as well.

Colocation services let clients take advantage of superior data centre infrastructure, while maintaining control over their servers. The benefits to colocation customers include environmental control (constant temperature and humidity maintenance, particulates filtration), fire suppression systems, redundant power sources and UPS backup, large capacity of multi-homed quality bandwidth, round the clock physical security (card entry, video monitoring of the facilities), and available monitoring and technical services such as central data storage, backups, firewall, DDoS attack mitigation and more. 

Using Colocation services is an effective way to obtain business continuity, scalability, and minimal network latency, at a fraction of the cost it takes to accomplish the same in a private data centre, while maintaining complete control over the physical server, the operating system and the applications. 

PEER 1 Hosting offers Colocation services at state-of-the-art facilities in 10 major city centres across the North America and Europe:

Europe

• Portsmouth, UK
• Fleet, UK

USA

• Los Angeles, CA
• San Jose, CA
• Seattle, WA
• New York, NY
• Miami, FL

Canada

• Vancouver, BC
• Toronto, ON
• Montreal, QC

Highlights of our Colocation Facility in Portsmouth, UK

• Immunity from natural disaster and power outages
• Flood protection, redundant generators and other critical electrical and cooling systems
• Constant physical security and surveillance
• HD colour camera system, MOD level biometrics, man trap and motion sensors
• Massive savings in time and money
• Share the benefits of innovation in sustainable technology
• Flexibility of hosting isolation: pod, cage or private rack
• Lower the environmental impact of you server and storage deployments through our green cooling technology
• 24x7x365 access to facility to your staff or authorised maintenance agents without prior warning
• Access to intelligent hands to work for you 24x7x365 – reboot, reload and trouble shooting