Featured Article - What is Colocation
When a company or organization chooses to rent space in another company's data center, it is known as colocation. Usually the company places their own equipment in this rented space, while the owner of the data center provides the basic requirements of networked equipment - power, cooling and a network connection.
There are many reasons why a company may choose to colocation. One is in order to take have their equipment in a quality local data center without needing to construct their own data center. This makes a lot of sense for smaller organizations - they don't need to go the expense of fitting and running a data center, but can rather just rent the space they need in someone else's data center.
Sometimes companies colocate because they need to have equipment in certain geographical regions, perhaps for performance or security reasons. For example, google has data centers located all over the world to services the enormous amount of visitors they get to the their websites. Other organizations may have a similar need to be spread out geographically - without the resources to build data centers all over!
Generally colocation customers get access to their equipment, which is kept in the data center and separated from other colocation customers through key cards, security caging, lockable cabinets, etc. If you're looking into colocaiton you should find out what local colocation companies offer in terms of access, as well as try to get a feel for the quality of their data center facility, level of staffing, experience, etc.