Colocation vs. dedicated servers vs. cloud: which fits your workload
Quick answer
The three options differ in who owns the hardware. With colocation, you bring or buy your own servers and Worldstream provides the rack, power, cooling and connectivity. With dedicated servers, Worldstream owns and manages the physical hardware for you. With cloud or VPS, there's no physical hardware to think about at all: everything is virtualised. Choose based on how much control you need over the physical layer versus how much you want someone else to manage.
Colocation: your hardware, Worldstream's facility
Colocation means placing your own servers and network equipment in Worldstream's data centre. Worldstream provides everything around the hardware, the rack space, power, cooling, physical security and connectivity, while you keep full control of the equipment itself: what you install, how you configure it, and when you upgrade it.
Worldstream's colocation facilities run on N+1 redundancy with dual power feeds, a PUE of 1.15, and up to 10kW of power per rack.
Dedicated servers: Worldstream's hardware, you manage the OS
With a dedicated server, Worldstream owns, houses and maintains the physical hardware. You get exclusive use of the server, but you're not responsible for the physical layer at all: no hardware purchase, no rack management, no dealing with failed components yourself. It's the middle ground between colocation and cloud: still a physical, single-tenant server, but without the operational overhead of owning the equipment.
Cloud / VPS: no hardware ownership at all
Cloud and VPS instances are fully virtualised. There's no physical server to think about, no hardware to buy, house or replace. You provision, resize and tear down resources on demand, trading the control of dedicated hardware for flexibility and speed of deployment.
Managing colocation day to day in Portal
The specs above describe the physical product. Day to day, colocation is managed in Portal under Datacenter Services → Colocation (this menu appears once colocation is enabled on your account). The list shows the packages you already own: Colocation ID, Package, IPv4, IPv6, and Status.
Open a package to see its Overview. Once the package is activated, three more tabs appear: Traffic, Power, and Networking, similar in spirit to the tabs on a Bare Metal server's detail page.
Choosing between them
| Colocation | Dedicated server | Cloud / VPS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who owns the hardware | You | Worldstream | N/A, fully virtualised |
| Who manages the hardware | You | Worldstream | N/A |
| Best for | Existing hardware investments, specific compliance or hardware requirements | Dedicated performance without owning equipment | Flexible, fast-changing workloads |
| Provisioning speed | Depends on your own hardware lead time | Fast, Worldstream provisions the server | Fastest, on demand |
Many customers don't pick just one. A common pattern is colocating hardware for workloads with specific compliance or performance requirements, while running everything else on cloud or dedicated resources, and connecting the two directly. See Connecting your colocated hardware to AWS, Azure or GCP for how that hybrid setup works.