What is Colocation?

Colocation (sometimes known as “colo”) is the practice of renting space for your servers and other computing hardware at a third-party provider’s data center facility. Typically, colocation services include the building in which everything is housed, as well as networking, physical security, redundant power and redundant cooling components, which then support the servers and storage provided by the customer.

Relying on a colocation data center allows you to eliminate the capital expenditures (CAPEX) of building and maintaining your own facility while allowing you to retain ownership and complete control of your physical servers. However, it still requires you to shoulder upfront hardware costs, and typically involves increased travel costs for your engineers in the event that they need to manually access the equipment.

How Can Rackspace Help?

Rackspace data center colocation services provide top-tier colocation services — access to our world-class data centers, backed by award-winning support and industry-leading Service Level Agreements — while minimizing downsides like travel costs and capital expenses. We provide a support team (including a Network Architect and Deployment Engineer) to handle the entire hardware life cycle management, as well as tools to remotely manage your environment. By leaving both routine hardware management and late-night emergencies to Rackspace, you eliminate travel expenses and free your own IT staff to focus on more impactful activities. Click here to learn more about how Rackspace Managed Colocation goes beyond traditional colocation.