The colocation industry is transforming the industry in many ways. Businesses all over the world are using these data centers to cut costs, enhance security and improve scalability of their services.

Many investors are considering buying stock in these companies. Here is a basic SWOT analysis that will help you understand more if you are considering investing in this new industry.

How is the Colocation Industry Growing?

The colocation industry generated $6.5 billion in revenue last year. Many experts predict that it will grow 50% by the end of 2017. There are a number of reasons why the industry is growing:

– Many companies are placing more emphasis on data mining. They are storing more data on their customers, suppliers and competitors. Using a shared colocation space will help them do so more easily.

– Many companies lack the resources to provide a secure platform to store their data. It is more cost efficient to outsource their data to a colocation center. Many companies are starting to realize how vulnerable their data is and are shifting it to data centers to save money.

– Colocation centers are becoming increasingly efficient. More companies are utilizing their services, which allow them to better leverage their existing resources. They are also developing new systems to store their data more effectively.

– Investors are paying close attention to the industry. They will be inclined to invest in colocation companies if the industry continues to grow.

Why is there little Competition?

While the industry is growing, competition has remained largely unchanged. Starting a colocation company is very capital intensive which deters new companies from entering the market.

This means that companies providing these services are probably going to grow their profits in the future. As Warren Buffet states, you should always strive to buy stocks in companies with a high return on equity. These companies are going to see their ROE increase as the industry continues to grow.

Challenges to Industry

The industry is expected to grow significantly overall in the next few years. However, there are also some challenges that they will face. Here are a few things that you will need to be aware of.

New Regulations

There are a number of new regulations that will make data centers more expensive. For example, stricter data sovereignty laws will force colocation providers to be more careful about which servers they use.

Competition from Cloud Providers

Cloud computing companies are also growing in size. Many colocation providers are also cloud providers, but others may have to find a way to distinguish themselves.

Utility Costs

Colocation companies will need to consider increases in utility costs in the future. These costs won’t be significant for many companies, but some will have to address them. Some experts pointed out that many colocation companies now have to pay additional water fees to have their systems activated.

Investors Remain Interested

The colocation industry is changing significantly in the coming years. Some experts predict that it will be worth $10 billion within the next four years. This may be a lucrative opportunity for private and institutional investors throughout the world.

About the author: Kalen Smith is a former engineer who writes about new developments in the technology field. He is fascinated with how technology impacts our lives.

The post Opportunities and Risks Colocation Investors Face Over Next Few Years appeared first on Colocation America.

I wrote an article here a year ago about how your web hosting plan can affect your search engine rankings.

The first factor that I addressed was the role your server location plays in SEO.

Here are some guidelines that can help you decide whether or not to use a server in another region if that is where your targeted audience is located.

Why Your Hosting Affects Your SEO Rankings

Google always strives to make sure users find content that is relevant to them. According to John Mueller, a webmaster analyst at Google Switzerland, most people would rather have content written in their native language than find a high quality product. That is why Google has different search results for people in different regions.

Google takes into consideration the location of your server when ranking your website. You are more likely to rank well in the same region your server is located.

How Important of a Role Does Your Server Play?

Your server location is a significant variable when you are ranking with Google. However, you may still rank well in other regions.

Hosting a web server in a country that has more advanced web servers will probably help your rankings more regardless of what region you are trying to target. That is one of the reasons most websites in smaller Asian countries use hosting providers in the United States. They rank higher in the search engines and their websites are more reliable for their visitors.

It is always a plus to choose a server in the region that you are targeting. However, you should make sure that you take other factors into account as well.

You can also help your site rank better by using a geo-targeted domain. Websites that have these domain names are automatically going to rank higher in the region denoted with the domain extension. The location of the server will be completely irrelevant. You may want to look into getting a country specific domain if you are going to be targeting a specific region.

Deciding Where to Buy Your Hosting

You may want to consider buying your hosting plan from the region that you are trying to reach. This may have some SEO benefits and reduce the time it takes for your visitors to load sites. However, it is much more important that you choose a hosting provider that is reliable.

Your search engine rankings will suffer if you host your website with a provider that is always crashing.

If you are going to choose a hosting provider overseas to reach your audience in that region then you will want to review their uptime guarantees, bandwidth capabilities and other features carefully.

There are other options that you may want to consider instead to ensure that you get the rankings that you want.

You may want to target visitors with the same website on different domain names. You can use different ccTLDs for the different regions that you want to target. This saves you the hassle of needing to find different hosting providers for the different domains for the regions that you want to target. The Google Webmaster team also says that it generally isn’t necessary to hide duplicate content with robots.txt files or non-indexing.

You should also bear in mind that advances in technology are also going to force Google to change its algorithms over time. Cloud computing in particular is changing the role of web hosting. Many experts predict that Google will need to adapt as more websites move to the cloud. Many companies using cloud hosting have already found that their sites are ranking similarly in the different regions they are targeting. More companies are going to stop worrying about the region their servers are located and simply put their websites in the cloud.

About the author: Kalen Smith is a former engineer who writes about a variety of technology topics – such as cloud computing and SEO.

The post Does Hosting a Website Overseas Affect Your SEO? appeared first on Colocation America.

If you have your own website or are otherwise responsible for any type of website, you certainly know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a major concern for generating traffic. After all, you want people to be able to find your site via the major search engines, such as Google and Bing.

This means that once you have found the right combination of SEO techniques for a site, you may be reluctant to make any changes whatsoever, lest they drag down your SEO. Even if you have good cause to change web hosts, such as poor customer service, slow loading times or overpriced services, you may be hesitant. But you should rest assured that it is not only possible, but actually quite simple to change your web host with minimal to zero effect on your sites SEO by following these simple steps.

Select Your Server Location Carefully

Whether your target market is your customer base, your readers or your potential clients, you probably already have a good idea of where they are located. Your SEO goals should include ranking highly in those geographic areas. For instance, a U.S. based business that only sells to U.S. customers may put the most importance on Google.com while a UK-based business may prefer to rank highly on Google.co.uk. That’s why the first step you should take when deciding upon a new web host is to ensure that you can choose the location of your server. Since search engines use server location to determine their search results, it is essential that your server be located in the country that is most important to your business.

Take Steps to Avoid Downtime

The most common way that switching web hosts has a negative effect on SEO is when the change leads to site downtime when users and search engine crawlers cannot access the page. Luckily there are a number of ways to prevent most, if not all, downtime when you switch web hosts. Be sure to perform plenty of tests on the new site with the new host well before you go live. Make sure the page loads quickly and completely and that all necessary files are changed over.

Make the Switch Quickly by Changing Your TTL

Ensuring that your sites switch to a new web host happens quickly is also important. This can be accomplished by changing the TTL, or Time-to-Live, on your DNS records. Your DNS records are what communicate your IP address to anyone and anything that is looking for your site. Usually these are cached for 24 hours, but when you are changing web hosts, you can manually reduce this time to a much smaller increment, like five minutes, which will force users to your new host much faster. Speeding up this switch means that you will not have to wait and worry for 24 hours before the change is complete and that search engines will find your new host as fast as possible.

Maintain Both Servers for at Least 24 Hours

Even if you are able to properly change the TTL on your DNS records, you will want to make sure that there is some overlap on your new and old servers during the change. Most experts agree that keeping your site up on both servers for 24 hours is plenty of time to let any caches clear and have all users landing on your newly hosted page. You should find it a relief to know that it is unlikely that switching web hosts will have any negative impact on your SEO even if you do not manage to follow each of these steps to the letter. However, a smooth transition with no downtime can only improve the SEO of your page and reinforce your decision to make the transition to a new web host.

Author Bio: Kalen Smith is a freelance tech writer and web-host expert. He keeps tabs on all the latest hosting news and follows all the popular web-host topics.

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