Four ways to narrow down your data center choice

Blog provided by Electric Kitten

Is your business looking to make the move to a hosted data center? The data center that hosts your applications can vary based on several factors. Here are the most critical features that should be part of the selection criteria:

Connectivity – Internet connectivity is key to business-critical applications, whether it’s to server internal customers to external, a loss of connectivity is a possible disaster.  Look out for a provider that has redundant ISP links as well redundant link types. A primary and secondary wired link with a failover wireless link is a good place to start.

Security standards – Chances are that any customer will not be privy to the security standards and procedures of a data center. That information, rightly, needs to be carefully protected. However, the standards, or minimum standards are easy to discern from audit reports and/or certifications of the facility. The higher the minimum standard, the better.

Power – Look for a similar level of redundancy with electricity as you would with internet connectivity. How many different connections to the grid do they use? Do they have agreements with different utilities? How many hours/days can the onsite generators handle the entire load. When looking at risks, think natural disaster scale.

Location – There are two components to this. The further the data center is from your operation, the longer it will take if you need physical access to a faulty server. Also, it can affect the round-trip time and latency to your end users.

If you need an LA colocation or dedicated server provider you can trust, contact Electric Kitten today. They’ve provided reliable web hosting services for almost two decades. If you are located in the Southern California area, give them a call.