What’s The Difference Between Colocation and Dedicated Hosting?

Posted on February 10th, 2009


What’s the Difference Between Colocation and Dedicated Hosting?

Colocation, also know as co-location and sometimes collocation, is a server hosting service where the customer’s physical server is placed at a 3rd party data center. The customer purchases their own server hardware and software licenses and place them in a data center. In this type of hosting, customers have the flexibility to manage, secure and maintain their servers while the data center provides the server space, security, redundancy, controlled air temperature, UPS and managed server solutions. Colocation is probably the most expensive type of server hosting and is preferred by people who are experienced in server administration.

With dedicated hosting, customers get a server completely dedicated for their online applications, however the customer does not own it, they rent it. The hosting company provides all services offered at the datacenter including maintenance, security and backup. Dedicated servers also promise better speed and enhanced security. A dedicated server is suitable for businesses that have to manage large volumes of data on their online applications.

A dedicated hosting customer has the complete freedom to modify dedicated server settings such as the operating system or the server hardware components. This service enables businesses to scale the server based on their business requirements. Moreover, the service promises better online application monitoring capabilities to users and they can increase the uptime of the applicatoin, giving maximum optimization to the contents.

In managed dedicated hosting, for the most part the hosting company owns and controls the dedicated server hardware and operating systems. Customers are generally allowed to manage the data through remote management tools as they don’t always have root access. Managed hosting allows the hosting provider with better control over the server by not allowing the user to modify the server.

There are pros and cons for both colocation and dedicate hosting. With colocated the customer must purchase the server hardware, so initial setup costs can be high. In dedicated hosting, a user gets all services offered in colocated hosting through an exclusive server offered to them but doesn’t maintain ownership of the hardware.