Also known as: Colo
Colocation (colo) is renting space, power, cooling, and network connectivity in a data center for hardware you own — you keep your own servers while outsourcing the building around them.1
Overview
A colocation provider sells you a slice of the facility — a few rack-server units, a full cabinet, or a locked cage — plus metered power, cooling, and uplink bandwidth. You buy, install, and maintain the machines; they guarantee the environment and uptime, along with physical security and often a fast cross-connect to carriers or cloud on-ramps.
This sits between running a home server (you own everything, including the room) and renting compute outright. The appeal is keeping full ownership and control of the hardware while gaining a facility you could never economically build: redundant power, industrial cooling, and carrier-grade connectivity.
Tiers
Colocation is usually sold at one of three granularities, trading price for isolation and control:
| Unit | What you get | Typical tenant |
|---|---|---|
| Rack units | A few U in a shared cabinet | One or two servers |
| Cabinet | A full lockable rack | Small business |
| Cage | Fenced private floor space | Compliance-heavy or large fleets |
Power is metered (per kilowatt or per circuit), and providers bill separately for cross-connects and extra bandwidth, so the real cost depends as much on power draw as on floor space.
Where it fits
Colocation suits organizations that have already invested in hardware, need physical control of their machines, or have compliance reasons to keep ownership, but lack a reliable facility of their own. The alternatives are a fully provider-owned dedicated server, a managed hosting arrangement where the provider also runs the software, or cloud computing where you rent capacity with no hardware at all. A GopherTrunk back end could be colocated, but the RF capture still belongs at the antenna, not in the colo cage.
Sources
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Colocation centre — Wikipedia, on renting data center space for customer-owned equipment. ↩