Colocation is a term used to describe a certain type of IT Hosting service provided by telecommunication facilities and data centers to clients who own equipment and need to house it. There are different levels of Colocation – from colocation of a single standard desktop computer or rack server to rack enclosures (cabinets) used for colocation of multiple computing appliances.

The minimum services provided by the host facility (data center) to a client are: space, power feed, access to internet service, power and cooling. The facilities usually house IT equipment into rack cabinets (See “Server Cabinet”, “19-inch Rack” and “Tower Server Rack”), mount them into rack units, connect them to special types of power distribution units (PDU) and connect them to networking equipment (network switches) to provide them with Internet connectivity.

The terms “Shared Cloud” and “Shared Cloud Hosting” are not very different from Cloud Hosting. They also refer to an Internet Hosting service delivered from a group of servers. The term Shared Cloud Hosting (Shared Vloud) is not  precisely defined yet. However, a “Shared Cloud Hosting” could be considered a service delivered from a computer system in which the computing resources (processing resources) are distributed. To be considered as “Shared” any Cloud hosting service must be powered by a software platform which does not create isolated virtual instances. In a Shared Cloud, all data resides in a shared storage system or network (shared pool). Cloud accounts (name based or IP based virtual hosting) share the computing resources of all servers part of the system.