Selecting a Service Platform - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 62

Contract Questions for Hosting Providers
The contract you sign is the baseline of what to expect and what obligations the
provider has toward you, the customer. Here are some key questions to ask your
potential providers:
1. If you want to exit the contract, will you be able to take all your data with you?
2. In the case of physical machines, if you wish to leave, can you buy the ma-
chine itself?
3. What happens to your servers and data if the vendor goes bankrupt? Will they
be tied up in bankruptcy proceedings?
4. Is internet bandwidth provided by the vendor or do you have to arrange for it
yourself? If provided, which Internet service providers (ISPs) do you connect
to and how much oversubscription is done? What's the hardware and peering
transit redundancy?
5. Are backups performed? If so, with what frequency and retention policy? Can
you access the backups by request or are they solely for use by the vendor in
case of a vendor emergency? How often are restores tested?
6. How does the vendor guarantee its service level agreement (SLA) numbers for
capacity and bandwidth? Are refunds given in the event of an SLA violation?
3.4 Colocation
While not particularly considered a “cloud environment,” colocation is a useful way to
provide services. Colocation occurs when a datacenter owner rents space to other people,
called tenants. Renting datacenter space is very economical for small, medium, and even
large businesses. Building your own datacenter is a huge investment and requires special-
ized knowledge about cooling, design, networking, location selection, real-estate manage-
ment, and so on.
The term “colocation” comes from the telecommunications world. In the past, telecom-
munication companies were among the rare businesses that built datacenters, which they
used to house their equipment and systems. Some third-party companies offered services
to the customers of the telecommunication companies, and it was easier to do so if they
could put their own equipment in the telecommunication company's datacenters. Thus,
theycolocatedtheirequipmentwiththetelecommunicationcompany'sequipment.Inmore
recent years, any rental of datacenter space has been called colocation service.