Retail Colocation Vs. Wholesale Colocation: What’s The Difference?

When it comes to managing and maintaining IT infrastructure, data centers are crucial for businesses. Because each business’s computing requirements are unique, it is essential to choose the right type of data center to fit each individual businesses’ requirements. Companies can choose to rent the space and power required for their IT infrastructure at a data center through either a colocation or a wholesale provider. 

What is colocation?

Colocation involves housing privately-owned servers and networking equipment in a third-party data center. Typically, colocation facilities provide space, power, cooling, physical security, and connectivity to a variety of telecommunication and network service providers. Instead of keeping servers in-house or in a private data center, businesses can rent physical space and power for servers or computing hardware by colocating in a third-party data center.

Retail vs. wholesale colocation

With retail colocation, businesses can rent space for deploying their own IT equipment. Retail colocation might be the right fit if a business does not require significant space or power and does not have IT staff in place to manage and maintain servers.

Wholesale colocation

Wholesale colocation typically involves the leasing larger quantities of space and power – typically multiple megawatts of power, and allows companies to determine how the space is designed and built. The responsibilities to manage and maintain a wholesale data center can be the responsibility of the data center provider or by the end user.

Retail colocation might be the right fit if your business does not require significant space or power and does not have IT staff in place to manage and maintain server space. While wholesale colocation gives you more control at an optimal cost and is an ideal solution if your business requires a lot of space power

Which is right for you – retail or wholesale colocation?

Which is better – retail or wholesale colocation? The optimal solution depends on a company’s requirements. Retail typically offers more flexibility while wholesale provides more control.