A dedicated server or colocation. Which do you choose?

When an internet project grows and starts needing powerful equipment, users face a choice: a dedicated server or colocation? 

In this article we will look at both options and describe their main pros and cons. 

First let us give a few definitions. 

A dedicated server (dedicated) is a service in which a hosting provider's server is given over to a customer's use. 

Colocation (co-location) is the service of placing a customer's own equipment on a technical site. If a customer has a server of their own, they can order such a service and place it in the provider's data centre.

The two services have things in common:

• The server's configuration is chosen by the customer themselves with either service. 
• Full access to managing the server is given both for dedicated servers and, of course, for your own.
• Flexible configuration. Installing software, an operating system and the utilities and applications needed is done by the customer in both cases. Both a dedicated server and your own can be configured to your taste. 
• Access to IP-KVM is given both for a dedicated server (permanently or on request) and for equipment in colocation. If something fails and the server will not boot, IP-KVM lets you see what is happening to it during boot and make the corrections needed. 

Now let us look at the drawbacks of colocation:

1.  Buying expensive equipment — before placing a server in a data centre, a large sum has to be spent on buying it all at once, which is not always possible or, for instance, does not match the profit from the project it will host. A dedicated server requires no such outlay, because you pay to rent the server rather than buying it outright.
2.  The ability to change the equipment's location around the world is not available to colocation customers. You can of course buy a server, take it to the USA, say, and arrange installation and maintenance with a data centre, but the money and time that takes would be out of all proportion to the cost of the equipment itself. Customers renting a server, on the other hand, can simply order a server of the configuration they need at a particular point on the globe.
3. Ease of upgrading. If the server is yours, you will have to find, order and change the components yourself. If you rent it, the provider does that and all you have to do is submit a request. 
4. Ease of disposal. If your own server is outdated and no longer suits the project, you have to get rid of it before it turns into scrap metal altogether. That is, it has to be sold, and that is a problem too, since not many people want to buy outdated hardware and you will get back many times less than you put in. With a dedicated server, disposing of outdated equipment is the host's problem, not yours. 

If you leave out the cost of buying your own server, the monthly cost of placing it works out cheaper than renting a dedicated server. A dedicated server costs more because the provider has to build into the price the purchase of the server itself, the replacement of equipment when it fails and so on. 

For clarity we have gathered the main differences between these services:

Which service to use is always decided by the customer in the end, and we hope this article helps everyone choose the one that suits them best.