Cost Comparison of the Amazon Cloud vs. Standard Colocation Hosting

Cost Comparison of the Amazon Cloud vs Standard Colocation Hosting

Introduction

Colocation and cloud computing are in many ways synergistic saviors for an IT department wishing to attain economies of scale, increased agility, a reduction in complexity and additional cost savings. While virtual dedicated servers are without doubt the future direction of the industry, colocation still occupies an important place at the table for a hands-on IT team. Both collocation and cloud computing reflects an ongoing theme that began in the 1990s with the birth of the Internet: The continued outsourcing of complex IT operations to more sophisticated 3 party service providers.

This trend has accelerated in the 21 century with most of the attention focused on the tremendous advancements in virtualized technology offered through cloud packages such as VMware and Xen Sandbox enterprise servers (both offered by Virtual Internet). However, it would be mistake to surmise that colocation has no role to play as the march towards virtualization continues (projected to account for 80% of all computing provisioned through the Internet by the year 2020).

In fact, a recent survey of IT departments revealed that only 51% of respondents use virtualization within their in-house IT infrastructure, and only 32 percent use it in colocated servers. As many as 57 percent of respondents, said they did not believe that virtualization would significantly reduce their data center footprint.

Another study indicates that 83% of respondents are planning data center expansions through 2011. Increasingly, IT organizations are looking to third party suppliers with flexible financing strategies as a means to supplement their own aging datacenters. To fully understand the advantages of colocation in relation to cloud computing it's essential to examine the full range of hosting options available to an IT department (including virtual dedicated servers offered by Virtual Internet).

Shared hosting

In this configuration, the company website is one of many on a single server sharing a common pool of resources. Cheaper costs come at the expense of security and stability.

Traditional Virtual Private Server (VPS)

This basic virtualized environment divides a single server into multiple servers without directly impacting the hardware. Users typically do not have root access. It's more flexible and secure than a shared package but growth is restricted since resources are limited.

Dedicated server

In this scenario, the company has almost complete control over the hardware, including ownership. The user engages the server through remote FTP access, VPN and/or RDP. All resources are dedicated but entry costs are higher and redundancy requires extra investment.

Traditional Colocation

Colocation allows a business to outsource only the support infrastructure of a data center -- heating, cooling, site security, connectivity, and so fourth, while maintaining company-owned servers. This offshoring of technology to a provider reduces both cost and complexity.

Managed Colocation

A variation of traditional colocation is something called managed colocation, which removes the burden of managing the infrastructure. The user remotely manages and administers the environment, including the networking devices, monitoring tools, and the operating system, giving some measure of control. Managed Colocation typically offers greater value ...