Own Server Room or Colocation?

Where the servers should live usually gets reduced to a price comparison. The real difference between the two options is not money, though — it is who carries which risk. In your own room, power cuts, water and physical security are your problem. In a data centre those problems are handed over for a monthly fee, and in exchange the distance to your hardware grows.

Five-year cost lines: your own room

• Room preparation: floor, door, insulation, cable routes
• Electrical infrastructure: dedicated supply, panel, earthing
• Cooling: units plus annual servicing
• UPS and battery replacement — batteries age long before the unit does
• Cabinet, cabling, monitoring sensors
• The electricity bill, including what cooling consumes, not just the servers
• Annual maintenance and repeat acceptance testing
• Components due for renewal at the end of five years

Five-year cost lines: colocation

• Monthly cabinet or rack-unit rental
• Power, which most contracts meter and bill separately
• Connectivity and traffic
• Remote hands: someone performing physical work on your behalf, usually by the hour
• Initial setup and migration
• The link between your office and the data centre
• Travel: time and cost for every physical intervention
• Contract term and exit conditions

The lines people forget

Comparisons usually break on what is left off the list rather than what is on it.

In your own room the two most commonly forgotten items are the cooling share of the electricity bill and battery replacement. Cooling can consume close to what the servers do, and batteries get replaced at least once in a five-year window.

On the colocation side the usual omissions are remote hands charges and travel time. Swapping a disk, plugging a cable or power-cycling a device either costs a fee or costs a journey.

When your own room makes sense

• You run systems that need low local latency — production lines, automation, camera systems.
• Large volumes of data are generated and processed locally; moving terabytes daily is expensive.
• Hardware needs frequent physical attention.
• Your building already has decent power and physical security.
• You already have a working room. Abandoning an investment that works is often the most expensive option available.

When colocation makes sense

• Building-side risk is high: frequent outages, water exposure, weak physical security.
• You have to run continuously and do not want to invest in a generator.
• There is no suitable room, and building one costs more than several years of rental.
• You are growing quickly — adding a cabinet is easier than enlarging a room.
• Connectivity is business-critical; a data centre's link is stronger than most offices can obtain.

There is a middle path

For many businesses the right answer is neither extreme. Day-to-day systems stay local while a copy of the backups lives in a data centre. Latency stays low and the building risk stops being uncovered. We covered that arrangement in the off-site backup article.

Five questions that decide it

• If you lost power for a day, would the business stop or merely slow down?
• How many power or water incidents has your building had in the past two years?
• How many times a month does someone physically touch the hardware?
• Do your systems talk mostly to local machines or to services on the internet?
• How much more capacity will you need in five years?

Those five answers usually clarify the picture before any spreadsheet does.

The rest of the build

The six stages of a build, on-premise versus cloud over five years and the hybrid arrangement.

How Yamanlar Bilişim works

Before this decision is made we measure the current situation: the building's outage history, the condition of the room, the real load of the equipment and how often physical access is needed. Depending on what that shows, we either build the room or plan the move to a data centre. Example projects are on the case studies page.

Frequently asked questions