Colocation means housing your own servers and network equipment in a professional data centre. You remain the owner of the hardware; the data centre provides the space, the power, the cooling and the physical security.
What exactly do you get?
A data centre is built for one purpose: keeping equipment running without interruption. In practice that means:
- Redundant power — multiple feeds, uninterruptible supplies and generators. If the grid fails, your equipment keeps running.
- Cooling — servers produce heat; the data centre removes it in a controlled way.
- Physical security — access control, cameras and surveillance. Nobody just wanders up to your rack.
- Connectivity — direct access to carriers, internet exchanges and networks such as ours (AS211588).
You rent space per unit (1U, a "pizza box") up to whole racks of forty-odd units.
Colocation versus an in-house server room
A server room at the office looks cheap until you do the sums honestly: air conditioning, backup power, fire suppression, access control and a second internet connection together quickly cost more than a rack in a data centre — and even then you still would not match what a data centre delivers. A single power cut or cooling failure on a hot day can cost more than years of colocation.
Colocation versus cloud
Cloud and colocation are not mutually exclusive; they answer different questions:
- Cloud fits when you want to scale quickly without investing in hardware, and when your workloads lend themselves to shared infrastructure.
- Colocation fits when you want full control over hardware and data, are looking for predictable costs with a stable workload, or run specific equipment that cannot live in the cloud.
Many organisations combine the two: the core in colocation, the flexible layer in the cloud.
When does colocation fit?
Colocation is the logical choice when you:
- want full control over hardware and data;
- have demanding uptime and performance requirements;
- want to scale up without running a data centre yourself;
- are looking for stability for business-critical systems.
Colocation at Xyphen IT
We provide colocation in Dutch data centres: rack space in the three BIT-owned data centres in Ede (100% Dutch, ISO 27001 and NEN 7510) and in the Greenhouse Tier 3 data centre in Naaldwijk (N+2, AMS-IX on site). That includes connectivity over our own network and engineers who know your environment.