Finding the best colocation hosting company can be hard to do because choosing your web hosting is so important. There are many things to look upon when choosing your web hosting company, I will try to cover the major ones in this article. I will also list the major differences between colocation hosting and dedicated server hosting.



First of all, what is colocation hosting and dedicated web hosting? Colocation hosting is having your web sites hosted on a server along with other clients just like you. As for dedicated web hosting is having your own server in your company's datacenter.



When choosing a colocation hosting company, one must look into:

• Reputation
• Have they been online for a long time
• What is the feeling when visiting their website
• Is the FAQ section complete
• What kind of support do they offer? Just online or phone support, are they available 24/7?
• How is their control panel? Complete or you need to contact them everytime you need to setup a database?
• Does the colocation hosting company seem to put many efforts in security?
• Is SSH access available?
• Do they offer a money back guarantee?

Of course the whole package is very important:

• How many databases allowed
• What type of database
• Monthly bandwidth
• How many domains and subdomains
• Web space
• Depending on your level of expertise, do they offer web building tools, online store, SEO tools...
• Do they offer both Linux and Windows web hosting?

The price is also an aspect you should look upon, but every good hosting company offers similar prices. If a colocation hosting plan is a little more expensive, but you feel more confident with this company, please go with your gut feeling!

If you don't know what type of package to choose between a colocation hosting plan or a dedicated server hosting plan, keep this in mind:

Colocation hosting is:

• Cheaper
• Less management for you
• Faster to get up and running

Dedicated hosting is:

• More secure
• More flexible (you can run what ever you like on that server, but carefull with security issues!)
• More expensive, packages usually from 100$ a month and more

So if your looking for a colocation hosting company, be sure to do your homework, because setting up everything takes time, and changing hosting company can give someone a lot of headaches with all email accounts, databases FTP access and more.