Data centers offer a variety of services, and you need to find the one that fits the best with your particular needs. Some businesses only need to protect a few records here or there, while others have mail servers, customer data, and market research to protect. When choosing a hosting service, it is incredibly important to have a data center that is well-equip for disaster recovery.

Colocation

Colocation is a physical method of disaster recovery that prevents you from losing your data just because an issue, such as a fire, occurred at your physical office location.

Colocation allows you to have your servers at an offsite data center, and also get better server security than if you had your servers in any location that you could fit them in your office location.

Some other data centers take this concept a bit further, allowing companies to rent out office space within the colocation centers so that the IT department has a great location for data storage as well as a place to do work. They don't have to access the colocated servers from the business location, where everyone is upset about data loss. Instead they can get hands on with their servers as they take care of the problem.

Downtime

Downtime is another dirty word in the business world, and you want to do everything possible to ensure that you don't experience it. Your customers are not going to be very sympathetic during downtime, and you don't want to run into any issues that could cost you money. Disaster recovery applies to issues with downtime as well, as colocation services take the worry out of your hands. The technicians at the data center ensure that the hardware is up and running, performing regular maintenance and troubleshooting that might not be a priority of your IT department if they have many other responsibilities.

Another service that data centers use to mitigate downtime is through power generators. Your customers across the country aren't going to care that you lost power due to a storm, they want to order the latest and greatest product right now. If they can't, they're going to go somewhere else for it. Having generators at the colocation data center avoids problems caused by natural disasters and bad storms.

One of the other factors that should go in to your data center search is the type of network speed that the data center has. Unless you are a big business, you probably are going to get a major speed advantage when you put your servers at a data center. It's their main business, so they can afford to get the fastest network speeds.

Your data center is a key part in making sure that you never experience major losses due to disasters. You never know when one can happen, but you can be completely prepared so that you never have to deal with data loss, customer loss, or similar problems. Take your time in choosing a data center so you get the best service for your business.