When you want to sign up for colocation hosting, it makes sense to look for the best data center services. Else, you may have to spend more to take yourself out of the agreement than what you had paid to sign up with them. This is why it is necessary to take into account some important factors when making a choice. You must assess your daily business needs and targets you hope to achieve. This will help you understand the kind of colocation hosting solutions you need. There are some businesses for instance which may require extra colocation centers for data archiving and data replication. Moreover, your data center provider should be in a position to scale your resources up whenever you need to for future growth.

Factors to consider for the best data center services:

• Power: When you are keen to sign up with the best data center services, you will need to ensure that the colocation provider can provide you enough power to support new technologies. Data centers have witnessed growth in power densities and today client enterprises need nearly 10kW for every cabinet. But, not all colocation providers can offer this kind of power for their customers. 


• SLA Flexibility: It is important to choose data center providers which have flexible terms in their SLAs or Service Level Agreements. So, when you are planning to choose the best data center services, you need to address contractual items which may be crucial for your business. If you can discuss the SLA terms with your colocation host, you can get an idea about whether the host will be able to tweak the terms for your convenience. You should never select the provider first before finding out whether they are open to negotiating terms of the contract.


• Network Carrier: Most facilities are restricted by a few network carriers which will offer clients telecommunication services. This is why when you choose the best data center services, you ought to ensure that it can provide you with multiple network carrier choices. Multiple network carriers will indirectly ensure that you get the advantage of competitive pricing.


• High-Density Facilities: Studies show that just because the floor area of a data center is huge, it does not mean that it is an efficient data center. When you can guarantee efficient solutions without taking up a whole lot of space, you can actually provide services at affordable costs.


• Location: When looking for the best data center services, you must identify providers which have data centers in ideal locations. This means that the data center should not be in a region know to be vulnerable to calamities like tornadoes and floods. At the same time, your data center should not be so far away that you have to pay steep prices for transporting men and materials to it. The data center should not make you incur very high networking costs. If it is too far away from your facility, you may have to shell out a fortune for disaster recovery services.


• Security: You must choose a provider only after being certain of the physical security arrangements it offers for data protection. You need to clearly understand the security policies and procedures offered by your vendor.


• Business Continuity: For this, you need the cooling, power systems and networking equipment to be far superior in your data center provider facility. Your vendor should have the capability and expertise to handle sudden power outages.


• Compliance: The best data center services will ensure that the facility is SSAE 16 compliant. You should be careful about not signing up with vendors who make false claims about uptime guarantees and Tier-availability.

• Managed Services: When your provider can offer managed colocation hosting, you do not have to send over your IT teams to carry out repairs. Your internal staff is free to focus on other important business activities.


• Growth: Finally, the best data center services will always support future business growth. It is wise to choose a provider which offers scalability and is open to changing SLA depending on your demands.


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