The difference between web hosting and colocation

Written by Rack Alley

What is the difference between colocation and website hosting? Colocation is a hosting service where your physical server is placed within a thirty party data center. In this scenario, you own everything from the server to the licenses of the software running on that server. You are also responsible for everything related to the operation of the server. If anything happens to the server, the sites or application running on it, it is your responsibility. The colocation provider would only be responsible for the proving the space, power, cooling and Internet connectivity to that server. LA colocation for example would be to host your servers in a Los Angeles data center provider.

Website hosting is much cheaper but is also limited in what it provides in comparison to colocation. Website hosting can also be subdivided into two types, shared hosting and dedicated hosting. In shared hosting, your hosting account is one of many on the same server owned and operated by the hosting company. These packages are very cheap but are also severely limited in capability. Dedicated hosting is where you pay for an entire server for yourself, but the server itself is owned and maintained by the hosting company. In this you effectively pay a rental for the server and other services. Here your limitations are in the lack of flexibility in server specifications and what you are allowed to do with the server hardware. Use LA web hosting if you want your website hosted in Los Angeles.

Both of these types apply to two very different scenarios. If you own servers and want to move them from your data then colocation is your preferred option. Hosting your website alone is when you would select shared hosting and larger more complex sites and application with a lot of traffic will need dedicated hosting at the very minimum.

Rack Alley provides server hosting los angeles for businesses that are looking for high performance in California.