Choosing cheap rent rack space is not an easy task; you will have to consider many factors to make sure you are not getting duped. Cheap data center rack space is offered by many colocation hosting providers. However, not all are trustworthy as time will tell. To get reliable colocation hosting solutions, there are indeed some important checks.
Why do businesses need cheap rent rack space?
Colocation hosting providers are sought by businesses which find it hard to maintain private data centers. Affording an individual data center is not simple; you will not only need to pay for the hardware for data storage, for housing servers and other networking equipments; you will have to pay for electricity, air-conditioning, security arrangements and even technical supports. All these amount to very steep costs for small and medium sized businesses. This explains why such enterprises want to get cheap rent rack space. This will let them place their servers in the rack space belonging to a third party in exchange for affordable rents.
What factors should you check for when choosing cheap rent rack space?
Poor Quality of Services and Support: When you have found cheap colocation hosting services, you need to ensure that your colocation provider can give you good security, a high uptime, excellent connectivity, uninterrupted power supply, optimum cooling systems, excellent support and security etc. A cheap hosting plan may be lacking in such features. You will probably be provided with inexperienced technical teams and you will find downtimes becoming frequent. The staff may not be trained and qualified enough to resolve technical server problems without delays. These cheap rent rack space providers will perhaps not spend a lot of money on getting good quality hardware for storage or well-trained and experienced IT staff for maintenance. So, if the support services are inadequate you will possibly end up paying much more to repair any technical issue. The applications become unresponsive during this time and with the site slowing down; your sales drop.
Inferior Data Centers: When you get cheap rent rack space, you need to understand that the vendor possibly has an inferior data center. When a vendor has a state-of-the-art data center, it will be spending a lot of money on its maintenance and upkeep. But when a provider owns a poor quality data center, its costs are lower. So, it can offer low priced rack space to your customers. Unless your vendor has data centers of the Tier III and Tier IV categories, you cannot expect them to be fault-proof. Signing up for cheap data center is likely to put your business reputation under threat.
Another very significant drawback of choosing only cheap rent rack space is that the provider may outsource its operations to another party. So, the provider’s own management staff does not have any control over the running of the data centers. This also means that when your business needs additional resources like cooling supplies or bandwidth; you cannot rely on your host.
So, while finding cheap colocation plans for your business may be great, there are many hidden drawbacks to low-cost rack spaces which you need to be aware of. Sometimes the companies offering such low priced rack spaces are not even financially stable themselves. To be sure therefore, it may be a good idea to check for their past financial reports and go through customer reviews. The best way is to try using the services of providers which give free trial periods for testing their plans in advance.