Total cost of ownership (TCO) in Information Technology (IT) is the total cost of the staff and infrastructure to support your business. When crunching numbers to determine the TCO of your IT department, and how that fits into your day to day operations, disaster recovery and business continuity plans, take that one step further to compare those numbers versus colocating your servers in a data center.

Scenario
Let’s say your business earns $5 million in annual revenues, with very aggressive plans to grow to $6 million. That extra $1 million will be the result of realized growth opportunities and a reduction in expenditures / streamlining your operations.

Optimizing Services
Most small businesses of this size employ one or two technicians to manage their servers, desktops, laptops, switches, hubs, printers, phone systems, email, applications, backups, etc. Your annualized investment can easily exceed $300,000. Your business data needs to be communicated internally as well as externally, so the applications and hardware can’t be scaled back, although they may be optimized by upgrading to more efficient services.

What's the difference?
This is the scenario thousands of small businesses find themselves in today - only with scaled back growth projections due to the credit crunch. So how could these companies lower their Total Cost of Ownership by colocating their servers in a data center? What do data centers have that aren’t part of their existing department.

Datacenters
Servers colocated in a data center are normally secured in a cage or rack, with regulated power, dedicated connectivity, layered security and on-site support services 24×7x365. Data centers typically have alarms monitored for fire, smoke and moisture, and power is backed up by a UPS and diesel fuel generator – greatly diminishing any loss of mission critical data due to fire, theft, vandalism or loss of power.

Nice writeup, thanks Steve!

Good write up *props*

Looks good mate. Thanks

Data centers protect their servers, already have their technicians, support team, fire protectors... I rely on data centers as on professionals, as it is cheaper and safier.
Thanks for raised topic!

In-house do not have the speed like colo offer.

Not generally - but we have provisioned fiber to a significant number of clients offsite. Redundancy is key for colocation.

Couldn't agree more with this.

Any business should be a tool in the hands of professionals. Using colo data centers is essential. The best way is to use VDS or VPS.

I have a question - how do u promote yourself? Have you ever used Xrumer? I use colocation centers and need a good promo!

The problem we had was when you do inhouse it actually costs more in heat, hydro and internet.

I would recommend co-location, I second jbvps' answer and would like to add external factors, such as stress.

one good tip: outsource everything you can. focus on your core business and you'll be successful.

That's a good pointer, but make sure to remember to choose the right provider!