New-Level Colocation: How Providers Add Value Beyond Offering Physical Space

Advanced Hosting Team

Businesses face pressure to innovate while cutting costs. To stay competitive, they need to both streamline operations and meet increasingly strict regulations (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, etc.).

Add the rising threat of cyberattacks, and it’s easy to see why many companies choose to own their infrastructure. It enables them to achieve security, redundancy, and operational continuity. In industries like healthcare, finance, iGaming, and adult funtech, lacking these can lead to heavy fines, reputational damage, or even business suspension.

Building a custom infrastructure often starts with colocation.

Historically, colo just meant renting space and power in a data center through a provider. But today, vendors like Advanced Hosting offer much more. They package deep technical expertise into a full suite of colo-related services – from procurement and network architecture to monitoring and advisory. We sometimes refer to this as Colocation+.

The extended services take major infrastructure headaches off the business’s plate. They help companies meet compliance requirements, ensure redundancy, and optimize costs. In turn, that helps them prepare for milestones like an IPO, reduce risk, and build investor confidence.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at what colocation means today – and how additional services enable businesses to dramatically increase its value.

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Get a consultation about next-level colocation service from AH’s infrastructure experts.

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What is Colocation?

First things first: conventional colocation offers a physical environment for your IT infrastructure, and that’s it. 

In essence, you’re only getting a configured data center space where your hardware will be stored, and a provider will help you secure it within a top-tier data center. 

In fact, seasoned vendors will be able to leverage their established relationships with prominent DCs to get you not only the space but also beneficial conditions and, at times, priority access even when availability is limited.

What you get with colo is:

• Space. A dedicated spot in a secure environment.
• Power. Reliable and often redundant electrical feeds, which can be metered based on your usage or provided as a fixed allocation.
• Cooling. While not always itemized separately, most vendors and data centers include temperature and climate control as part of the standard colocation package, ensuring your equipment operates within optimal thermal conditions.
• Physical security. Robust measures and on–site staff to protect your assets.

What Colocation Is Not

Colocation is not managed infrastructure. You retain full responsibility for the entire lifecycle of your equipment. This means your team handles the installation, configuration, monitoring, and ongoing maintenance of your servers and devices. If a hardware component fails – be it a hard drive or a server power supply – it’s on your team to resolve it.

It also has nothing to do with cloud computing. Unlike cloud platforms, you’re not paying for computing resources on an hourly or consumption-based model. There are no APIs for programmatic infrastructure provisioning, nor is there inherent elasticity where resources scale up or down automatically. With colocation, you run your workloads on hardware you own and control, situated within a facility managed by a third party.

If the company’s needs extend beyond the basic physical environment – perhaps they’re looking for bare metal leasing, procurement support, or advanced network design – these are typically offered as specialized extra services, built on top of the foundational colocation offering. 

But some providers have gone far beyond the basics. They add value by taking the operational burden off their clients entirely. Think hardware selection, ordering, delivery, warehousing, setup, testing – the kind of tasks companies have neither the expertise nor the desire to deal with. AH is exactly such a provider.

What Colocation+ Adds

Colocation+ (or colocation with additional services and value) builds on the traditional offering by filling in the gaps that companies don’t want to deal with themselves. You still benefit from the physical infrastructure of a premium data center, but you don’t have to bring everything with you – or manage it all alone.

Here’s what colocation+ typically includes:

Better Connectivity, By Design

Colocation+ environments are backed by serious network infrastructure. With AH’s services, for instance, you get:

• Direct connections to multiple Tier-1 carriers. Specifically, we have top global internet providers simultaneously delivering service, resulting in maximum redundancy.
• Access to internet exchange points and peering agreements that improve latency and availability
• Guaranteed point-to-point links between data centers with clear SLAs for capacity, availability, and latency
• Optional diverse routing (physically separate paths, cabling, and equipment) for resilience

This baked-in performance is useful when you’re moving critical workloads or building distributed systems that can’t afford weak links.

Procurement and Leasing Flexibility

Not every company wants to own hardware up front. With colocation+, you gain flexible CAPEX options. You can choose between ownership, rental, leasing, or installment payment models, aligning perfectly with your financial structure. Plus, thanks to the provider’s strong vendor relationships, you can acquire the hardware at better prices with less overhead. 

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Whether you lease, rent, or own – we’ll help align infra costs with your cash flow and CAPEX planning

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Support for High–Density Workloads

If your workloads require high performance per square meter (e.g., AI training, analytics, or large-scale compute), Colocation+ can accommodate high-density server configurations and help you avoid unnecessary overhead from scattered, underutilized racks. It can lead to significant savings.

This goes both ways, however. While the allure of packing maximum compute into minimal space is strong, we at Advanced Hosting have observed many organizations pursuing the high-density approach for applications where a more diversified or distributed infrastructure would prove far more effective and safe. For instance, some applications benefit more from geographical distribution for lower latency or specialized hardware that isn’t typically part of a high-density setup.

This is where the expertise of your colocation partner becomes invaluable. A competent vendor provides guidance, helping you architect and select the exact components that perfectly match your operational context and long-term strategic goals. Their in-depth knowledge and ability to translate complex requirements into optimal infrastructure design are usually an integral part of the colocation+ offering.

Predictable Migration Options

OK, now it’s time to discuss how clients migrate their infrastructure between data centers. And again, in the interest of keeping all the info fact-based rather than theoretical, we’ll be going by AH’s own experience.

Migration is one of the most operationally sensitive parts of any infrastructure strategy. Downtime, data loss, configuration drift, and coordination failures are all real risks. Therefore, a well-thought-out strategy is critical. Ours is always customized. There are three primary approaches:

1. Full Relocation (Lift-and-Shift)

This is the most direct, hands-on migration path: the full physical relocation of infrastructure from one site to another. Systems are shut down, hardware is disassembled and packed, then transported and reinstalled in the new facility.

This approach is generally used when:

• The infrastructure is relatively self-contained or non-distributed
• Downtime is acceptable within a predefined window
• The client prefers to keep their existing hardware rather than refresh or lease new equipment

From the provider’s side, this method demands intensive, short-term mobilization of technical resources to swiftly dismantle, transport, and reassemble infrastructure. It requires meticulous coordination between both teams, with preparation often taking significantly longer than the physical move itself.

The team will develop a clear project plan, detailed roadmap, and defined areas of responsibility, outlining who does what, when, and how. This includes preparing detailed asset inventories, rack diagrams, cable layouts, and power plans long before a single screw is loosened, alongside a precise communication plan. A dedicated client service manager will be allocated to expertly oversee the entire process, from the intricate planning stages right through to execution.

This method is suitable when:

• You’re moving a relatively self-contained infrastructure
• You can tolerate a controlled, scheduled downtime window
• Speed and simplicity of execution matter more than continuous availability

2. Phased Migration with Cross-Site Connectivity

For businesses that can’t afford a complete shutdown, phased migration offers a more resilient alternative.

In this model, the new environment is set up in parallel to the existing one. A temporary network connection is established between the two sites. Then, systems are migrated in stages: one group of services, one application layer, or one business function at a time.

Both environments run simultaneously during the migration period, giving the business time to verify performance, reroute traffic gradually, and resolve issues before cutting over entirely.

This phased model is particularly useful when:

• Applications are interdependent or hard to decouple
• Minimal or zero downtime is required
• You want to test and validate each step before committing fully
  

For example, the provider might migrate supporting infrastructure (like monitoring or backups) first, then data services, then applications. Or, client workloads might be grouped by business unit or region. In each case, the pace and order of the move are based on actual system behavior, not a checklist.

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Our engineers can help you map out the right colocation setup and migration model for your stack

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3. Logical Migration (No Physical Relocation)

Sometimes, the most efficient move is to leave the hardware behind entirely.

In a logical migration, new infrastructure is deployed in the destination location – often newer, denser, or more power-efficient hardware, whether leased or bought by the client. Instead of moving physical equipment, the provider sets up the environment, establishes connectivity, and manages data synchronization between the two locations.

Once the systems are in sync, workloads are tested in the new site. When everything is ready, traffic is cut over – with no downtime, no trucks, and no physical disruption.

This model is common when:

• The client wants to refresh the infrastructure while relocating
• There are risks or costs associated with moving legacy hardware
• Business needs have changed, and a clean slate is more efficient than a literal move
  

It’s called a “logical relocation” because you’re replicating function, not form. You move the system, but not the server. And for many companies, that makes far more operational and financial sense.

Summing Up

Using colocation or colocation+ is about making infrastructure decisions that age well. It gives you the structure of physical infrastructure without locking you into a single financial or technical model. You can scale up or down, shift from leasing to ownership, redesign your network, or migrate incrementally – all without being forced to rebuild from scratch.

That kind of flexibility matters.

It matters when you’re launching a new product and don’t yet know what infrastructure profile you’ll need in six months. It matters when you’re preparing for technical due diligence and need a clear, auditable story about how your systems are secured, managed, and costed. And it matters when you’re simply trying to keep infrastructure spend under control, avoiding ballooning cloud bills while retaining the ability to move fast.

Colocation is for when you want more predictability, ownership, and control, and Colocation+ makes that option usable even when your team doesn’t want to handle the operational heavy lifting.

With colocation and adjacent services, you can build infrastructure that can adapt as your business changes. Schedule a consultation with our technical expert to determine if AH’s colocation offering is right for you.

Talk to our tech lead to learn how AH’s colocation can give you control, flexibility, and certainty.

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