Volico Private Datacenters Reduce Costs and Risks for Businesses Running Colocated Servers

TL; DR: Volico delivers a range of services, including colocation, dedicated server hosting, and managed services from its private Tier IV datacenter in South Florida. The company offers businesses robust support from its five total datacenters and consults on disaster recovery, business continuity, and migration projects. Volico is also ramping up its marketing efforts to reduce business complacency about disaster planning.

Although shared and virtual server providers are easy to find, businesses searching for an optimal colocated server provider often have additional questions. Topics including proximity, datacenter ownership, and infrastructure tiers take precedence. Those subjects can be made more complicated by the smaller number of providers that specialize in colocation.

Volico built its private datacenter with colo services in mind and has grown its business through a mix of wider hosting offerings, strategic investments, and external acquisitions. The company owns all of its infrastructure and allows its clients to customize their experiences.

“We were formed by a group of experienced network engineers in 2000. From there, we’ve earned a reputation for attention to detail and our commitment to the latest datacenter technologies and innovations,” said Gadi Hus, Volico Director of Operations.

The company launched its first datacenter in 2006, and it has grown into a major Tier IV facility that connects the South Florida, Atlanta, and Chicago markets. The facility, which Gadi said minimizes risks without compromise, is the only Tier IV datacenter in the region not owned by a real estate investment trust. It was also built to avoid airline flight paths and employs electrical, cooling and network-infrastructure redundancies to mitigate disasters.

“We deliver a fully integrated, trusted hosting environment,” Gadi said. “Our staff and high-profile product partners provide enterprises with cost-effective and dependable services.”

The company’s product portfolio includes colocated servers, managed services, dedicated hosted servers, and a suite of cloud-computing technologies. Volico also delivers a focused mix of disaster recovery, business continuity, migration, and distributed attack mitigation to protect customer data.

Those services aim to ensure customers can continue to function even if natural or human-made disasters disrupt business operations.

“Our network operations center is staffed 24/7 with experienced network technicians who actively monitor infrastructure, connectivity, and application-layer responsiveness,” Gadi said. “We also provide technical support and engineering offloading for customers who need to concentrate on their day-to-day work instead of worrying about their infrastructure.”

For companies that rely on colo frameworks, the return on investment can be significant. Not only does the customer not have to physically manage their hardware, but they also don’t need to run their own datacenter, with all of the labor that it requires.

Datacenters are also typically far away from the company’s business locations anyway, as the distance protects against fire or other disasters that may damage or destroy corporate assets. So, other than price, many businesses don’t notice the difference.

“In our facilities, we offer quarter-cabinet, half-cabinet, full cabinet, multiple continuous cabinets, and cage options,” Gadi said. “We support clients from an IaaS basis, application-level, and even down to the kernel execution layer.”

Its solutions run the gamut of what a typical datacenter offers in space and protection for physical access to colocated servers.

On-demand compute pricing is typically more expensive than on-premise compute pricing. As such, the long-term financial performance is best for colocation when the business is relatively stable and does not incur a high degree of variability with its computing needs.

Startups that cannot make significant capital investments, or that have unclear computing needs, generally find that on-demand computing offers a better return. For companies that don’t need pure colo servers, managed service arrangements may make more sense.

Volico’s managed-services division offers a mix of technical and consulting support to help clients achieve their objectives.

“Working one on one with clients to understand their business model, pains, gains, and deficiencies allows Volico to offer custom-tailored support services beyond the traditional rack-and-stack,” Gadi said.

On the technical side, Volico offers a smart hands service that extends on-site staff to support customer IT needs. Its managed cloud services deliver public, private, and hybrid clouds that are easily deployed and have different fee models.

For example, the public cloud facilitates fast deployment of infrastructure in a shared environment, with an easy-to-scale framework and pay-as-you-go pricing. The private cloud functions as a virtual datacenter within Volico under a fixed-cost model.

The company’s deliberate and focused disaster-recovery and business-continuity planning services go beyond the minimum. Volico delivers free disaster recovery planning assessments with expert consulting services during emergencies. It also offers move-in ready backup office space at the Broward County, Florida, datacenter to support emergency business operations if a client’s primary business location is damaged or otherwise disrupted.

The datacenter is located just off Interstate 95 and is within one mile of several major hotels.

“Most datacenters today will only flip a switch for a reboot and do not have the level of support we provide. That makes all the difference to businesses,” Gadi said.

Volico’s support team is fully employed, not outsourced, and is available by phone or email. The company maintains an online knowledge base, and because it is privately owned, its support engineers are familiar with individual clients and deliver service beyond a generic help desk.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Volico has seen the demand for more data, faster speeds, and more security.

“We’ve witnessed law firms increase bandwidth commitments, and enterprise clients migrate more infrastructure from their offices to support work from home,” Gadi said.

As a Tier IV datacenter in South Florida, Volico is well-positioned to offer a full range of hosting and managed services solutions — from single dedicated servers to dedicated colocated server suites.

The company’s expertise with disaster recovery and planning also helps clients prepare for the worst in a cost-effective manner. Its datacenters in Alabama and Illinois provide more peace of mind to larger businesses that choose to outsource their computing architecture.

Gadi said that many Volico customers have migrated from very large public-cloud datacenters run by major industry players. Those companies are easy to use because they offer point-and-click deployments, but they’re often expensive, and when things go wrong, there’s rarely a support contact. Companies disappointed by that model turn to MSPs like Volico, where a personal touch not only streamlines the tech implementation but reassures nontech corporate leaders.

“These days, clients are colocating servers, storage, firewalls, switches, and routers,” he said. “You name it; we have most probably seen it. Clients also have different driving factors as to why they are using datacenter services. We enjoy working with the full spectrum of clients and their hosting needs, big or small.”