ABSTRACT
Services-centric hosting includes both managed hosting and content delivery. Co-location includes floor space, rack space, network, power, air conditioning, and aux power, but typically not much more. Request the hosting company’s financial fundamentals: revenues, gross margins, years in business, number of servers/storage, numbers of employees, locations, employee average time employed. The big advantage of managed hosting providers is they have experience: experience running systems efficiently, experience in migrating data, experience in protecting data. The common component is the physical infrastructure; they all offer floor space, power, A/C, security, and network. The big difference is the computer and storage infrastructure: With co-location, it’s compute and storage owned and operated by the IT department.
