How to prepare for and look for a colocation provider

Article by Electric Kitten

When choosing between multiple providers for the same service, often the best options are the ones where you spend as much time searching for the provider as you do for the actual migration. Why? Because moving from an in-house data center to an external data center is a costly affair. Both in terms of time and money. Getting it wrong is very disruptive and expensive. Here are some ways you can prepare for your search:

What is your plan?

Everyone looks at their day-to-day requirements, but you should also take a step back and look at what your plan is for the near, mid, and long term. It could be architectural changes, or even moving to hybrid systems. Then see how well these fits in the provider and if there any limitations, clauses, etc. that will be problematic.

What are the business requirements?

Are there any business requirements that will affect the long-term IT plan? Does the organization need a dual-home architecture to immediately failover to an alternate site during a disaster? Does the alternate site need to run around the clock? The same applies to replication or data archiving. Do you need another data center for those requirements?

Is there a growth plan?

Most organizations will have a three-to-five-year plan at minimum along with projections for revenue, staff, locations etc. Ca the provider scale to those requirements? Will there be additional costs for that kind of expansion?

If you’re looking for colocation or server hosting in Los Angeles, contact Electric Kitten. For almost two decades, they have provided reliable colocation service, along with other web hosting options such as shared hosting and dedicated servers. Their colocation clients will have access to a state-of-the-art SAS-70 facility located in the One Wilshire Building in Los Angeles.