Co-location and hosting

Co-location suits you when you already own the hardware, when the software is licensed to specific machines, or when a regulator or an auditor wants to know exactly where the data sits. You keep total control and you keep the responsibility for the box.

Hosted servers suit you when you want the outcome without the capital purchase or the refresh cycle. The hardware is ours to replace when it ages, which removes a planning problem most businesses would rather not have.

Public cloud is usually right for workloads that scale up and down sharply. It is often the wrong answer for a steady, predictable load running every hour of every day, where the monthly bill quietly exceeds what the same capacity costs in a rack. We will say so if that is your case.

What to ask any provider (ours included): how power is delivered and whether it is dual-fed, how cooling is handled, who may physically reach the rack and how that access is logged, and what the network in front of it looks like. A cheap rack behind a congested uplink is not a bargain.