First decide whether you are buying space for your own hardware or virtual computing resources. Specify primary and recovery locations, power and connectivity, operational responsibility and the required recovery targets. Compare only equivalent service scopes: infrastructure monitoring does not automatically include operating-system, database or application management. Request the exact contractual service levels and relevant hosting evidence.

What to compare

Primary role

Which infrastructure need is covered?

Hosting model

Is the offer colocation, dedicated hardware or cloud infrastructure?

Data locations

Where do production data and backups reside?

Resilience and recovery

Which redundancy and recovery features are included?

Operational responsibility

Which layers are provisioned, monitored and managed?

Provisioning

How are resources delivered and changes requested?

Commercial terms

What resource, usage and support charges apply?

Buyer questions, answered

How does colocation differ from cloud infrastructure?

Colocation hosts customer equipment within a data-centre environment. Cloud offers provide computing resources that can be selected or configured without renting physical rack space as the primary product.

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Should a cloud quote specify backup locations?

Yes. Record where backups reside, what is included and how recovery will be tested. The same questions apply even where both locations are in one country.

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