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Colocation Providers offer many different types of On
Site Colocation Services. These services can range
from configuring your IP addresses, to simple reboots of
your colocation servers to installing new hardware,
swapping out hot-swappable hard drives, and helping you
over the phone by typing a few commands to help you
recover a server. Some
Colocation Service
Providers will perform reboots free of charge.
Some Colocation Service Providers will perform other
tasks such as helping you over the phone to recover your
servers for a fee. Some Premium Colocation Service
Providers will even go above and beyond your
expectations by offering this and even more, free of
charge, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. This
provides you tremendous value by saving you a
significant amount of time and money.
Basic On Site
Colocation Services
The Very Basic Colocation Providers will offer no on
site services whatsoever. These are un-staffed
facilities.
Fee Based On Site
Colocation Services
Some Colocation Providers will offer you some
services for a fee. These services can include a few
different things to help so that you would not
necessarily have to visit the colocation data center
when your servers go down or need maintenance. You
should also consider that the companies who will offer
these services for a fee will often require you to pay
for these services in advance. If your
server goes
down in the middle of the night, you would typically
have to wait until the next day for their accounting
department to process your credit card payment as the
person who processes the payments would not be working
in the office overnight. This downtime can result
in significant losses.
Some of the most Premium, Class A Colocation
Providers will offer some FREE On Site Colocation
Services often referred to as Remote Hands Services.
These are some of the very best
Colocation Data Centers
to be in as these companies show great appreciation to
their customers in many ways. These premium
facilities employ staff around the clock ready to help
you with your physical
server colocation needs. Most, if
not all other server colocation companies charge $100
per hour or more for remote hands service. Many
other companies don’t even have staff on site around the
clock.
Most tasks you will need can be done remotely via
software; however, if you need hot swappable hard drives
changed or someone to log in with a local laptop and
type a few commands to help you recover a
server, or if
you need them to set up your network and configure your
base IP addresses, or you want to ship equipment to the
colocation data center and have them install it in your
cabinets and configure the
network according to your
instructions, all of this is would be included at no
additional change. With on site 24/7 remote hands
included, your company can rest assured that your
physical needs are in good hands. Since 24/7 support is
included for free, you can easily estimate your monthly
server colocation expenses.
One of the greatest misconceptions in selecting a
colocation service provider is that you must acquire
colocation within the city that you live in so that you
can always drive to the facility to setup,
pre-configure, recover or maintain your servers whenever
your servers go down or require maintenance. A
premium
Colocation Data Center
should allow you to ship
your equipment directly to the facility and have the
expertly trained and certified staff configure and
install all of your equipment in your cabinets. This
includes configuration of the base IP addresses,
configuration of the network between the equipment and
installing the hardware in the colocation cabinet space
all free of charge. This can also include drop
shipments from the equipment manufacturers with
operating systems and software pre-installed. So
contrary to popular belief, it is possible to acquire
and setup colocation and never touch your servers at all
without paying any expensive additional service fees.
In addition, you can easily save thousands of dollars
each year in time and expense by selecting a premium
colocation facility that could even be thousands of
miles away from your home office. Here are some
reasons why. If you get a call at 2 a.m. that one
of your servers is down, you would have to wake up,
dress, find your car keys, drive to the facility, find a
parking spot, walk from the parking garage to the
building, go through the building security checkpoints,
wait for a security guard who can escort you to the
correct floor, locate your
cabinet then finally once the
security guard unlocks your cabinet, you can eventually
log into your
server. This process could easily
take from one to two hours before you can even begin to
diagnose your problem!
Not to mention the loss of time and frustration
created by the disruption of your life that is created
when you are on call at such a high level. In
contrast, if you were to utilize a remote hands service
that a quality
colocation service provider
would include
FREE of charge, you could receive a call and then call a
factory trained and certified network technician who
could walk you though a server restore over the phone in
fifteen or twenty minutes!
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