For businesses who rely on data centres for their day to day functioning, choosing the right one is an important but often difficult position. Data centres are critical infrastructure for many businesses, and they need to be invested in accordingly. When you work with a data centre provider, you are entrusting them with a crucial part of your business. Make sure that you partner with the right people and businesses by paying attention to the following advice.

Location

The nature of a data centre means that you aren’t restricted by what’s available in your immediate vicinity and you are instead free to choose one according to your own criteria. However, there are still some advantages to choosing a data centre that, if not nearby, is at least easy to reach. If anything goes wrong with your service, if you experience an interruption or have trouble accessing your data, you will appreciate being able to talk to and, if necessary, visit someone who works at your data centre.

For example, if you are operating in or around London, you could check out Virtus. They have data centres headquartered in and dotted about the London metropolitan area.

Another reason that you might want to see the actual data centre you will be using is because the physical security of your data is important as well. We’re not necessarily talking about someone physically stealing data by accessing the server it is stored on, although this is technically possible. However, a data centre that is built somewhere prone to flooding, for example, will need to have the appropriate protections in place.

Scalability

If you are planning on moving your operations from one data centre to another then you will probably already have a good idea of the kind of service you need. However, if you are looking at your very first data centre then you are probably going to be buying something with a future upgrade in mind. It pays to take the time to find a data centre that will enable you to scale your operations up or down as needed.

Some data centre providers provide a lot more customisation options than others. The more you are able to customise and personalise the package you buy, the easier it is to choose the right data centre from the get-go.

Reliability

This one is obvious enough. You want a data centre that is reliable and ensures that your data is always accessible. This means adding in backups and redundancies so that if one server goes down, another one kicks in. If you have ever bought an individual server for yourself before, you will already be familiar with concepts like uptime. You should go with a provider who offers 99.9%+ of uptime, as this is a reliable indicator that they are using redundancies.

Other important reliability markers to look for are the quality of customer feedback and the website’s customer service. A good way of determining the quality of a data centre’s customer service is to simply send them an email asking about their services. It is worth doing this just to see how they respond.

Deployment Speed

Once you have found a data centre provider, chosen the right package and ordered it, you then want to get things up and running as soon as possible. If you are working to a strict deadline, you need to make sure that the provider you are choosing is able to get all of your data online and running as soon as possible.

It can be hard to quantify exactly how good a provider is at getting you set up, especially as the specific package that you choose might impact the amount of time it takes to get everything ready. A good way of ascertaining how fast deployment is likely to be is to have a look at feedback from previous customers. Or, this could be another prime opportunity to test out the customer service capabilities of your chosen provider. Send them an email detailing the type of package you want to buy and ask them how long it will be until you’re up and running.

Financial Stability

Before you go anywhere near ordering a data centre package, you should establish how much money you have to spend. In business, every major decision you make should begin with a frank and honest accounting of, well, your accounts. For all the many advantages of using a data centre, there’s no sense in paying for one if it’s going to put a massive hole in your finances.

Partnering with the right data centre can completely transform your business’s fortunes. Of course, you need to make sure that you are investing in a data centre for the right reasons. Once you are certain that a data centre is the right call for your business, take the time to find the best service possible.