Data Center

A data center is a physical location (normally a building or part of a building) that houses core computing services and infrastructure, such as storage systems. Traditionally, organizations used on-premises data centers (meaning they maintained their own IT infrastructures on-site) but it is now more common to store data off-site using a cloud data center.

There are estimated to be around 8,000 data centers globally, with over 2,500 of these located in the US. Infrastructure providers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and IBM all have multiple data centers in many parts of the world. Cloudways offers a choice of over 65 worldwide data centers in locations across Europe, the Americas, Asia and Australia.
Every byte of data that exists online is stored inside a data center somewhere. As the world becomes increasingly reliant on the web, more and more data centers are likely to be needed, since the proximity of an organization to their data center can impact the speed and latency of websites and applications.
There are many different types of data centers, including: – Cloud data centers, which are managed off-site by a third-party or public cloud provider (such as Amazon Web Services) and operated as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – Enterprise data centers, which are created and owned by a specific organization to support applications and IT operations – Colocation data centers (sometimes known as “carrier hotels”), where infrastructure, space and bandwidth are leased by an organization through a third party – Edge data centers, which are smaller centers located physically close to the edge of the network – Hyperscale data centers, which are large business-critical facilities that encompass thousands of individual servers