The premier addresses of the Internet age include 56 Marietta Street, 210 N. Tucker Avenue, 111 Eighth Avenue, 2001 Sixth Avenue and 1102 Grand Blvd. They aren’t the fanciest of office buildings and many of them are not in the best parts of town. And while they go by a variety of names such as carrier hotels, Internet peering points, Meet Me Rooms, or co-location facilities, they are the best places around the country where a business can get connected and get gobs of reliable bandwidth for relatively low cost.

The story in today’s New York Times can be found here. There is also a short sidebar on suggestions on what to consider when picking your co-lo services here.

There are a lot of different ways to get involved with co-location, including getting started with a managed services provider for one particular outsourced application and then working towards moving more of your computing needs offsite. There are companies that just focus on outsourced email, including the free Google Apps and running Microsoft Exchange servers. The advantage is that you don’t have to buy, maintain and backup the storage and servers, and you can take advantage of the best Internet connections that these providers have. One of the largest Exchange outsourcers is 123Together.com, who charges $10 per mailbox per month for its smaller customers. 

Some of the other services offered including complete server management that handles backups, updates, routine maintenance and troubleshooting. But there are other providers, such as Slicehost, that don’t offer any of these services: just “ping, power, and an Internet pipe” to keep costs down. “You have to know what you are doing. We aren’t going to help you troubleshoot your applications or set up your database servers,” says Slicehost’s CEO Matt Tanase. For one or two servers, it makes sense to have the co-location provider manage the equipment. But as a business’ needs increase, there are companies that specialize just in keeping servers running and updated, such as Clearpointe.com in Little Rock, Ark.