The Importance of Location When Choosing a Data Center Provider

For modern businesses, digital transformation is inevitable yet potentially challenging. A proper digital transformation is data and bandwidth intensive, and to ensure its success, an organization needs a strong infrastructure which can be difficult to set up without enough resources and expertise. Therefore, to keep up with the requirements, more and more businesses across all industries are opting for professionally designed and managed colocation data centers rather than a dedicated on-premise infrastructure.

There are numerous factors to consider when choosing a colocation data center provider, from uptime guarantee, service levels, disaster recovery, customer support, scalability, and reliability to security, both physical and virtual. However, although everything on the list seems to be enough for consideration, there is another key factor companies need to think about: the data center location. Data center location refers to the exact building and area where the servers are stored and maintained, and it matters a lot more than a company might realize. Let’s dig deeper into why data center location matters by looking at the three factors that contribute to it.

Three Data Center Location Considerations to Keep in Mind

Weather and Natural Disasters
Being located on the Pacific Ring of Fire makes Indonesia more vulnerable to the risk of natural disasters. Floods, which regularly occur in most parts of Indonesia, often cause casualties and destroy infrastructure. According to the media, the massive floods which paralyzed the capital of Indonesia during the New Year’s eve in 2020 caused approximately IDR 1 Trillion losses. In addition, Indonesia also experiences at least one earthquake per year with a magnitude of six, or higher, that causes casualties as well as damage to the environment and infrastructure, resulting in economic costs. Natural disasters which impact buildings and facilities may cause massive critical data loss and downtime — two things businesses try hard to avoid. Therefore, it’s safer to choose data centers that are located in areas with more predictable weather patterns and minimum risk of natural disasters or providers with proven records of natural disaster risk mitigation and recovery plans.

Proximity to Users
In general, latency measures the time it takes for data to travel from its origin to its destination across the network. Although high latency is also affected by network efficiency and device quality, it’s mostly caused by the distance between the user and the server hosting a website. It means that the physical location of a data center can affect the speed and page loading times of the websites it hosts and lead to a poor user experience. Therefore, it’s best for businesses to choose a data center which is located near their customer base or their main traffic, especially if their customer apps rely heavily on fast response times and minimal latency. It’s also important to note that search engines take site speed and page-loading times into account when ranking sites for SEO. This means that if a company chooses a data center located far away from their user base, their search engine rankings will be affected.

Power and Network Accessibility
Network is the backbone of a data center, so it requires accessibility to commercial power and redundancy or full access to reliable connectivity. Besides access to a reliable power grid, the location of the main power stations, substations, and feeds to where the data center is built also need to be taken into consideration. Therefore, it’s important to choose a data center in a location with multiple commercial power feeds to ensure redundancy and a reliable power company for quick response time in the case of outages. In addition, access to multiple top tier network providers is also essential to guarantee reliable connectivity and continuous uptime.

Why neuCentrIX

As one of the top data center providers in Indonesia, neuCentrIX has always believed in the importance of data center location. neuCentrIX’s 14 data centers are located in the most strategic areas in various big cities with the highest economic growth in Indonesia — Medan, Batam, Pekanbaru, Jakarta, Bandung, Semarang, Yogyakarta, Surabaya, Denpasar, Banjarmasin, Balikpapan, Makassar, and Manado, ensuring proximity to a wider audience across the country as well as access to excellent power and networks. Moreover, neuCentrIX data centers are located in relatively secure areas, far from disaster prone zones, to minimize the risk of downtime and data loss. All these factors and benefits have made neuCentrIX a reasonable colocation data center provider option for businesses.