In the modern digital landscape, cloud hosting solutions often play a critical role in supporting a businesses’ IT infrastructure, allowing for immediate scaling, but more an more businesses are finding the costs associated with cloud are higher than originally anticipated. This article provides an insight into how different hosting models can be combined, from colocation to private cloud and public cloud to create a hybrid model that allows businesses reduce OPEX by providing a right sizing model, rather than fall over.
By understanding the differences between colocation and the different types of cloud hosting, businesses can make informed decisions about which solution, or combination of, meets their overall IT objectives.
Colocation Hosting
Colocation hosting refers to a service where businesses can rent space for their servers and computing hardware within a third-party data centre. This allows them to take advantage of the data centre’s infrastructure, including power, cooling, bandwidth, and physical security, while maintaining control over their own hardware and software. Colocation hosting can be a cost-effective solution for businesses that require a secure and reliable environment for their servers without the need to build and maintain their own data centre.
Private Cloud
Private cloud is dedicated to a single business. Unlike public clouds, which are shared by multiple businesses, a private cloud is built for the exclusive use of one business entity. It can be hosted on-premises or by a third-party hosting provider.
Private clouds offer many of the same benefits as public clouds, such as scalability, self-service capabilities, and resource pooling, but they also provide greater control, security, and customization options. This makes private clouds an attractive option for businesses with stringent security and compliance requirements, as well as those that need to support specific workloads or applications.
Setting up and maintaining a private cloud can require significant investment in infrastructure, but it can provide greater flexibility and control over data and applications.
Public Cloud
Unlike private clouds, which are dedicated to a single business, public clouds are shared by multiple businesses. Public cloud hosting is made available, on demand, to individuals or businesses over the public internet. Public cloud is always hosted by the provider.
The main difference between public cloud and private cloud is how it is hosted. Public cloud uses shared infrastructure, while private clouds use your businesses own dedicated infrastructure, this may be on site or via a hosting provider.
Hybrid Hosting
Hybrid hosting combines elements of either private and public cloud models and more traditional hosting solutions such as colocation. This type of hybrid solution allows organizations to leverage the benefits of both environments while addressing specific requirements.
Key features of hybrid hosting include:
- Flexibility and scalability: Businesses can utilize private and public cloud resources interchangeably, scaling their infrastructure based on workload demands.
- Cost optimisation: Hybrid hosting offers cost savings by utilizing public clouds for less-sensitive workloads and private clouds, or colocation, for sensitive or critical data.
- Data control and compliance: Sensitive data can be stored in a colocation environment, ensuring compliance with industry regulations, while other non-sensitive data can be stored in the public cloud.
- Complexity: Managing a hybrid hosting environment requires expertise in integrating and orchestrating resources across multiple platforms.
In summary, colocation hosting provides businesses with physical control over their infrastructure within a secure, managed data centre facility designed. Private, or public cloud hosting, can offer varying degrees of scalability, flexibility and cost saving by leveraging virtualized environments. A combination of both can be used to meet the changing demand of business IT infrastructure, as well as helping to drive down data transfer costs associated with public cloud.
If your business is currently hosting in the public cloud and you’d like to understand how moving to colocation could help streamline operations and costs, get in touch.
