Finding cheap rent rack space can be very profitable for any business that is looking for colocation solutions. When you must maintain servers on premise it can be quite a challenge, not only in terms of costs but also in terms of maintenance obligations. You will have to ensure that the server and equipments are stored in secure and climate-controlled environment. At the same time, the facility has to be easily accessible so that you do not have to wait for long periods to access the devices.
So, it is quite obvious why many businesses do not want to go through this trouble and they want cheap rent rack space. There are also others who lack the means to establish a proper infrastructure. Whatever the reason, colocation is a preferred option for many businesses and finding cheap rent rack space is a priority for these enterprises. Before you sign up for rack space from a third party provider, there are some important things which you must take into account.
- To start with, you need to understand how much rack space you will need to accommodate your servers. This space will be measured in terms of the unit “U” and most servers are going to occupy about 1-2 Us of rack space.
- When you choose to rent rack space, you will also have to see whether the provider can offer you a reliable VPN connection. Sometimes you may need higher bandwidth when your applications must function at an optimal speed. In case your current Internet Service Provider is not servicing that data center facility, you will have to buy dedicated IP address from the host.
- You must make sure that the provider you get your cheap rent rack space from is going to be responsible for carrying out routine patches and maintenance for your equipments. You also have the option of maintaining these equipments by yourself. Alternately, you can also send your staff to monitor the equipment on a routine basis.
- You must also consider the fact that your servers have to be physically shifted and then deployed in the provider’s data center facility. This means you have to either ensure that your on-site IT teams take care of this or you outsource the labor from your provider.
Given these factors you will find that the average rent amounts for colocation will be approximately $100-$300 a month for every unit. This charge will include pre-set bandwidth and IP address allocated to you. When you need more than this allocated number of IP addresses, you have to pay extra. Monitoring the servers will be considered as a separate service; so, you should ideally not consider these costs within your colocation expenses. Finally, depending on how many servers you will shift to the colocation facility, you will have to pay for engineering labor. When you migrate the servers to such off-site facilities you will perhaps also need to make minor changes to the infrastructure to make this happen. These are factors which you must consider when you are looking for cheap rent rack space.
Once you have decided to outsource your servers to a third party rack space, you have to upgrade your bandwidth because from now on, you must connect to the network across the Internet. You should also have redundant connections in place in case the main line fails and you need backup connections. You must also consider your firewalls and switch infrastructure as these have to function properly for you to be able to access data remotely. When you have signed up for colocation the data is stored off-site and this means that it is protected even if something happens to your office on-site. But, if something happens to the data center facility, you may be in trouble. So, it is recommended that you have data spread across multiple data centers to protect it against all kinds of disasters.
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