are there any major companies providing co-location or is it kindof a diverse scene? im curious about it but only really know about cloud VM... basically just looking for a site where i can read about one of these services / pricing plan. my main questions are about bandwidth -- for one company i freelance for, the majority portion of their bill is s3 IO and it would be huge for them to get to a capped pricing model even if speed suffers
tried googling but it doesnt seem so straight-forward... i like the idea though.
Colo can be confusing. There are large companies that have their own data centers (sometimes dozens of data centers) and many small companies that often bundle and re-sell services. I currently use CoreXchange, which is now owned by Zayo. I chose them partly because they are pretty close to me; I'm in Austin, the data center I'm hosted in is in Dallas. They have pretty clear pricing on their website and their connectivity and service is good and fast. But, there are many, many, good providers out there. I would check in your area (assuming you're in an area that has good backbone access; most large cities do), first.
There are cheaper providers and more expensive providers...sometimes, it can be hard to tell whether you get what you pay for, without actually trying it. But, most of the big colo providers have been discussed online at Web Hosting Talk or other places. When getting new service, I usually check WHT first for deals in my local area in a good data centers. Sometimes, for low bandwidth (where low bandwidth may mean something still kinda huge, like several terabytes of transfer per month) a reseller may be the best deal. Sometimes, going straight to the provider is the best choice. I ended up a CoreXchange by way of a deal from ColoUnlimited.
The good thing about going this route is that ongoing costs are somewhat lower, generally speaking, though up front costs are much higher (~$3000 for a server, for example). And, costs can be predicted with high precision. You can simply say, "I want this much bandwidth." and that's what they'll give you and bill you for. You're pretty much just paying for power and bandwidth when you're in a colo; all the other stuff is up to you (hardware upgrades, replacements, etc. either need to be done via shipping gear in and out or by going on-site to make the changes).
The bad thing about going this route is that it's all on you. This isn't "managed" hosting (though they do have staff on-hand, and you can usually pay for "remote hands" to handle system upgrades and such, it tends to be very pricey for anything more than simple reboots). And, scaling is non-trivial. In the bad old days, if you had a site get crazy popular overnight, you had to figure out how to get more servers online on short notice...maybe missing an opportunity to grow and blowing your shot at a good first impression on new users. AWS and other cloud services are much more readily scalable. But, there's no reason you can't build with scaling in mind, and use cloud services for elasticity while using colocated servers for your baseline service. That's how we do for our business stuff. If we suddenly need more servers online, we spin them up via Amazon or Google Compute Engine (the software I work on supports several cloud providers, as well as building cloud infrastructure out of heterogeneous servers, so this is not much different than managing VMs on our own hardware and we can move websites and such back and forth across our own machines and AWS VMs reasonably easily).
tried googling but it doesnt seem so straight-forward... i like the idea though.