Data centre or cloud? A buyer's guide for Bangladeshi organizations

The terms get used loosely, so a short definition helps. Colocation is rack space in a purpose-built facility. You own the servers; the data centre provides power with backup, climate control, physical security, fire protection and network connectivity. Hosting is a step further: the provider owns the hardware and you rent a dedicated machine. Cloud is virtual: you rent slices of compute, storage and network that can be resized in minutes.

Mango's Dhaka data centre has run since 2008 with 24/7 monitoring, climate control, a sprinkler system and 12+ hours of power backup. Mango Cloud runs in the same facility, with virtual servers starting at 1 vCPU and 1 GB RAM on SSD or SAS storage, plus Backup-as-a-Service.

• You already own capable hardware and want to move it out of an office server room that was never designed for it.
• Regulation or policy requires physical control of the equipment, or an auditor wants to see the rack.
• Your workloads are steady and predictable, so the flexibility of cloud buys you little.
• You run specialised equipment such as telecom gear, caches or appliances that have no virtual equivalent.

For ISPs, colocation next to the gateway has a second benefit: caches and core routers sit one hop from international capacity.

• You are starting small. A 1 vCPU server is enough for a portal, a website or a test environment, and it grows when you do.
• Demand is spiky. Admissions week, results day, a product launch: scale up for the event and back down after.
• You do not want to manage hardware. Failed disks and end-of-life servers become the provider's problem.
• You need backup and DR without a second building. Backup-as-a-Service gives you an off-site copy inside Bangladesh.

Local cloud has two advantages over global providers for organizations serving Bangladeshi users: latency, because the servers are near the users, and practicality, because you deal with a local invoice and a support team you can phone.

In practice the answer is rarely one or the other. A typical pattern: core systems and databases on owned hardware in colocation, public-facing applications on cloud servers that can scale, and Backup-as-a-Service protecting both. Because everything sits in one facility with one support line, moving a workload between the two is a conversation, not a migration project.

1. 01Where is the facility, physically? Visit it. Ask about power backup duration, cooling and fire protection.
2. 02How is it connected? A data centre inside a licensed gateway has a different network position from one that buys transit like everyone else.
3. 03What does support look like? Phone, email, chat, WhatsApp or Viber, and at what hours. Mango Cloud support runs 24/7 on all five.
4. 04How do you get data out? Backup, export and migration should be answered before you move in, not after.
5. 05What is the smallest step? A provider should let you start with one server and grow, without a minimum commitment that forces you to guess.