Colo is great. Sure all the cloud fanbois will tell you that you should only ever use the cloud. But frankly if you have decent tech competence in-house and y

Colo is great. Sure all the cloud fanbois will tell you that you should only ever use the cloud. But frankly if you have decent tech competence in-house and you do the math honestly, the cloud is far more expensive than colo, particularly for 24x7 loads over a multi-year period. If you buy quality kit and you put it in quality colo facilities then your hardware management should be minimal. Your main problem is going to be with your "How do you select a colo and what do you look for?" question. Whole books could be written on the subject of choosing a colo facility. If you are serious about colo, you should start by doing a few site tours with different operators. Doing that you can (start to) develop a feel for what differentiates facilities. There a lots of things you could look at, but the two near the top your list should be: - Connectivity: Ideally you want a carrier-neutral facility with a good selection of carriers to choose from - Power: Self-explanatory really. How much do I get ? Is it true A&B feed ? Are two good starter questions. If you look at those two items first, then you can start to draw up a shortlist from that. Once you have the shortlist, you can start nitpicking between the options.