10Feb, 2015

The Advantages of Using a Data Center

Particularly if you are running a small business or just starting up your business, you may find value in keeping your servers in a data center, where the combined buying power with other companies taking advantage of the same services helps to keep your costs down.

By handing off the maintenance responsibilities, you are also far less likely to experience network outages, since data centers necessarily have redundant backup systems for network access, electricity and climate control. Many even have their own backup power generators, which means that even in the case of a local power utility outage, they remain up and running – and through no extra effort on your part.

The Disadvantages of Data Centers

Although the financial burden involved with infrastructure and maintenance for an onsite server can be significant, your “upfront” costs for moving to a data center can be surprisingly high as well. Particularly if you opt for a colocation data center, where you provide both hardware and software, there may be major spending involved.

Even when the data center provides all of these resources, though, you are likely to have to pay initial subscription and setup fees. Note that over time, these fees may begin to feel negligible, especially as compared to the ongoing cost of an in-house server stack.