What Does It Mean to Be Co-Located?

As technology continues to shape how we do business, the term “co-located” is appearing more often—especially in IT, cloud services, and infrastructure planning. But what does it actually mean to be co-located?

In short: being co-located means placing your company’s servers and hardware in a third-party data center, instead of keeping them at your office or on-premises. You still own and manage your equipment, but it physically lives in someone else’s professionally maintained, highly secure facility.

Breaking It Down: Colocation in Practice

Let’s say your business runs several servers to host websites, databases, or critical applications. You could install these in a spare room at your office—but that comes with headaches: limited space, expensive power and cooling needs, and the challenge of ensuring uptime during power failures or internet outages.

Colocation solves this by offering rack space, power, cooling, and connectivity in a purpose-built data center. You “co-locate” your servers there—hence the name.

What You Get with Colocation

• Rack or cabinet space for your servers.
• Redundant power feeds, battery backups, and diesel generators.
• High-speed internet with connections to multiple carriers.
• Advanced physical security (badges, biometrics, surveillance).
• 24/7 access (remote hands or in-person, depending on the facility).

While the data center owns the building and infrastructure, you retain full ownership and control of your hardware.

Why Companies Choose to Co-Locate

There are several reasons organizations choose colocation over building their own server rooms:

• Reliability: Data centers are designed for high uptime with backup systems for power, cooling, and internet.
• Cost savings: Building and maintaining your own facility can be costly and inefficient.
• Security: Colocation facilities offer better physical and cyber protections than most small businesses can afford alone.
• Scalability: Need more space or bandwidth? Just lease more rack units.

Who Benefits from Being Co-Located?

Colocation is ideal for:

• SaaS and tech companies needing high performance and control.
• Financial firms with strict compliance requirements.
• Enterprises running hybrid cloud setups.
• Growing businesses outgrowing in-office server rooms.

Final Thought

To be co-located is to be empowered. It gives your business the infrastructure muscle of a major enterprise, without the capital and complexity of building your own data center. You keep full control of your servers, but they live in a place purpose-built to keep them online, secure, and connected.

In a world that runs 24/7, co-location is a smart move for businesses that can’t afford to go offline.