There is trend in enterprise IT where organization are shuttering in-house server rooms and data centers in favor of using third party data centers to host their equipment. There are several advantages to moving to a data center whether you are simply hosting websites or running your own application servers. Here are some of the more important elements to consider when choosing your data center provider:
Uptime
Data center uptime is measure as a percentage. The more 9’s in the uptime figure, the higher the uptime. For example, five nines, also shown as 99.999% only allows for 0.001% of unscheduled downtime. For business critical functions, fives nines are an excellent level of uptime. Match the level of uptime you need against what the data center provides.
Security
You will get a level of security at a data center that will not be practical for anything but the largest organizations. Proper data centers provide perimeter security, biometric controls, round the clock security guards, and CCTV camera coverage. Some data centers even provide rack level biometric controls. This will be important if you choose a Los Angeles data center and need physical access to your equipment.
24-hour support
Another important element to consider is the amount of support and monitoring. You should look for data centers that provide round the clock support. Rack Alley, a data center at the Wilshire Building in LA has 24-hour data center monitoring and a 24-hour Operations Support Center that you can reach out to for support and technical assistance.