How to choose a Data Center

Choosing a shiny new home for your server is kind of like choosing a real estate investment. Location. Location. Location!

Location is one of the most important factors when selecting your data center. 

Depending on the content you are delivering to your users and the size of your user-base, you will likely want to put the server as close to the people that you are serving as possible or even Ideally, serve your content from multiple points around the world if your users are spread out all over, with requests sent to the appropriate region based on client geolocation.

If your offering is not to the point where you need to put the content everywhere for your customers. Not to worry, deploying a ServerHub Bare Metal of VPS server in the data center nearest to you will make it easier to work with than one in a different region or a different continent.

So now that we’ve touched on the important of location, lets discuss the key points to consider when making your ultimate choice.

Proximity

There are two types of proximity to consider. The first is proximity to your content visitors as discussed above.

The second is proximity to your business.

When we talk about proximity to your visitors, we’re asking where your website is most frequently accessed from. These stats can easily be found through analytics software.

If you have linked your website with a Google Analytics account, you’ll find these stats under audience -> Geo -> location.

By clicking on an individual country, you will be able to see where most of your users are coming from. For us, those stats seem to indicate California and New York in the United States. From this, you can then create a list of potential locations. You can even go deeper by clicking on different locations to find significant cities. You should note, that usually at least picking a specific location on either West Coast of East Coast in the example of the United States is usually enough, depending on your user base marginal speed increases can be seen by going as specific to your users as possible.

Disaster Risks

In 2014, there were eight weather and climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each across the United States.”

For data centers, that can be troubling, especially if your business depends on up-time. Not only are natural disasters impossible to predict, they can also cause long-term outages.

ServerHub currently has over 10 data centers across the United States, Canada and the European Union. By looking at risk probabilities and population density, we believe we’ve found data centers that manage and tread the balance of risk.

Up-Time

If you can’t deliver content to your customer when they need it, what is the point? Right?

Up-Time is one of the most important aspects to be looked at when considering a data center. In today’s world customers want their content delivered 24 hours a day. 7 days a week. Several data centers claim to have 100% up-time. This number is more of a marketing gimmick and less of a reality. However, up-times of over 99.9% are common and entirely feasible when thought about in conjunction with redundancies such as dual fiber links, dual power, dual backbones etc.

Data Center Decisions

Although, it may sound complex and daunting. How you select your data center location is not as complicated as it may seem. As long as you stick to important factors, such as a logical location close to your customers, great history of up-time as well as disaster recovery options, you should do just fine.

If you don’t have a dedicated bare metal server provider yet, we definitely have solutions to help you scale your business to any size. We’ve built our offerings to over 10 data centers and are able to deliver your content for considerably less than competitors such as AWS, GCP and Azure. You can check out our current bare metal offerings here.