Self-build Data Center or Renting

• 13 November 2013
• by: Kenny
• in: Tutorial & Guides
• note: no comments

When you have planned to start a successful hosting company, it means you're going to serve a large portion clients on your servers. There're simply too many things to consider and data center facility is always the primary one. So our today's topic is, should you rent server space from ISP or build up your own data center? Which option is the best to power your business?

If you have done a bit research, you should have found there're various advantages for both options referring to investment, management and performance etc.. Here we carry out both advantages and disadvantages

Renting Server Space

It might be the primary choice for most start up hosting companies. You just need to submit the payment to ISP then you can get a portion of the data center to install your servers. All other resources such as security protection, power supply and cooling etc are prepared by ISP. You just need to focus on your business and leave all rest to your ISP. So basically we get following advantages in list

• Quick setup. You don't have to find a good place to construct the buildings and apply various hardware/software facilities to meet up with the business requirement. Using available resources will help start your business quickly with no waiting.
• Easy management. You just need to take care of your limited servers and don't need to worry about other stuff. In this way you can even setup your office beside the data center for quick response to any outage.
• Low cost. You just pay server rack renting and bandwidth fees. Any other expense will be supported by ISP management team. It's quite important for budget control from your business beginning because you need to invest multiple projects.

As we see, renting data center space brings us great convenience and advantage to start our hosting business. The most important is we don't have to deal with anything about the DC setup so the lowest cost is guaranteed. For start up company, cost control is very important since you must focus on business promotion. The best example from the industry is Hostgator which is just started from bedroom. Till present they still don't have their own data center space but renting from softlayer group.

Self build Data Center

Although we can easily rent data center space from lots of providers, many of us still want to get control for everything because we don't want to rely on outside resources for our business. Thus to build our own data center is a good choice if cost is not a big problem. Using our own data center space will bring us unbeatable advantages such as the following

• Better security. You have full control of every single setup so you can apply the best solutions based your experience. If you rent space from other ISP provider you can just accept the existing configuration. From your own data center, you don't get any limitation.
• Better scalability. No matter how your business grows you always have sufficient resource to deal with. You can customize the system in any way you like in order to ensure the max availability and performance.
• Better profit. Normally, after your data center is setup you will get lots of free space. You can sell to other people with good price to make full use of the facilities.

Building the company own data center is always the choice of big groups who have powerful financial support. Although it requires big investment from the beginning, there're lots of unbeatable features with the setup. Many popular hosting groups have their own data centers to ensure the best performance and availability. Some groups even setup multiple data centers from different locations to speed up their server connectivities.

Idealy, it's the best if a hosting company could setup their own data center because they can get full control of all equipment. When there's any outage, they can respond quickly for maintenance and reduce down time as much as possible. But that doesn't mean a hosting service without their own data center is bad. Instead, there're many reputable data center providers that're trusted by lots of hosting service. You just need to pick up the right provider. After your business grow up and you have sufficient financial support, it's highly suggested setup your own data center space.