If you are providing hosting, the most important thing that you need are your own web servers. You can ofcourse rent out servers from the most popular data centres in the world, but that would end up working out a lot more costlier than it would be when you just buy out the servers and co-locate them at any decent data hotel, of if you are in the US, just place them in your back yard and give it a good internet connection . But that wouldn’t be advisable. Let me tell you how to go about choosing the right server for you.

Advantages of buying and co-locating servers

1. You own the servers, No one can delete the data if for some reason the sites are suspended.

2. Just a moderate co-location charge needs to be paid towards co-location and ISP charges.

3. You can move servers between datacentres if required.

4. You don’t have to share your passwords to get into the servers with the people at the datacentre. Its fully private.

5. You can bring them back home when you want to, and run them from your spare bathroom if you feel like it.

Advantages of renting a server

1. You dont onw the server, so the hardware is the datacentre’s responsiblity.

2. OS level and hardware level support is free of charge, and is provided by the datacentre.

3. Low investment.

4. When you upgrade, you dont have to look for a waste basket to dump your old hardware. It is the data centre’s headache.

5. Flexiblity and support is great from datacentres for rented servers than co located servers.

There are disadvantages on both sides as well. As for Indyahozting, I have a big bunch of servers ranging from Celeron 1.3 GHz servers to Dual Core Conroe servers. All data centres sell servers too. At the time I bought them servers used to cost $800 to $1000 varying with the configuration, and these days it has come to $500 to $600.

So, how do you decide on the datacentre? Where would your servers feel at home? Which data center would help you give your clients the best service?

Contd…..