UK Data Centre Colocation Services
Accredited UK data centre space with 2N redundant power, enterprise-grade cooling, and 24/7 physical security — giving your hardware a home that's built for resilience.
Challenges we solve
Running your own server room is expensive, risky, and increasingly hard to justify when purpose-built facilities exist.
Outgrowing your server room
Your on-premises infrastructure has hit the limits of your building — power capacity, cooling, and physical space are all constrained. Expanding in-house means capital expenditure you'd rather avoid.
Physical security concerns
Office server rooms rarely meet the security standards your data deserves. Without CCTV, card access controls, and on-site security personnel, your hardware is more exposed than you'd like.
Power resilience gaps
A single utility supply and no generator backup means any power disruption takes your systems offline. Building true 2N redundancy in your own premises is prohibitively expensive.
Connectivity limitations
Your office location limits your connectivity options. A data centre gives you access to multiple carriers, cross-connects, and low-latency routes to cloud providers that simply aren't available elsewhere.
What is Colocation?
Colocation is the practice of housing your own servers and network hardware in a third-party data centre, rather than on your own premises, so you benefit from purpose-built power, cooling, security and connectivity without owning the building.
Claranet's Colocation service gives you dedicated rack space in accredited UK data centres, complete with redundant power, enterprise cooling, and round-the-clock physical security. You retain full ownership and control of your hardware — we provide the facility, the power, and the peace of mind.
Each facility is built to the highest standards: 2N redundant power with modular UPS systems, N+1 backup generators with 48 hours of fuel at full load, two separate incoming utility supplies, and ASHRAE-compliant HVAC cooling with N+1 redundancy. Security is equally rigorous, with on-site personnel, motion-sensitive CCTV, dual-authentication access, and locking racks as standard.
Choose from full, half, or quarter rack options depending on your requirements, with 24/7 site access for your authorised contacts and up to 30 minutes of Remote Hands engineering assistance per rack each month included in the service.
Key Benefits
- 2N redundant power with UPS and backup generators
- ASHRAE-compliant cooling with N+1 HVAC redundancy
- 24/7 on-site security with CCTV and dual-auth access
- Full, half, and quarter rack options
- 30 min/month Remote Hands included per rack
- 99.5% availability SLA with service credits
Why Claranet?
Purpose-built facilities designed for resilience, security, and uptime.
Rack options
Choose the footprint that fits your requirements — from a quarter rack up to a full 42U cabinet.
10U equivalent space
- 1 x 16A power feed (A or B supply)
- 12 x IEC-C13 + 2 x IEC-C19 outlets
- Locking front and rear doors
- 30 min/month Remote Hands included
- 24/7 access for authorised contacts
21U equivalent space
- 2 x 16A power feeds (A + B supply)
- 12 x IEC-C13 + 2 x IEC-C19 outlets per feed
- Locking front and rear doors
- 30 min/month Remote Hands included
- 24/7 access for authorised contacts
42U, 600mm x 1000mm
- 2 x 32A power feeds (A + B supply)
- 24 x IEC-C13 + 6 x IEC-C19 outlets per feed
- Locking front and rear doors
- 30 min/month Remote Hands included
- 24/7 access for authorised contacts
Technical capabilities
What makes Claranet's data centres a cut above
2N redundant power
Each facility provides fully redundant power with two separate incoming utility supplies, on-site transformers (11kV to 400V), modular UPS on both paths, and N+1 backup generators with 48 hours of fuel at full load.
ASHRAE-compliant cooling
Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems meet the ASHRAE TC 9.9 cooling standard. All HVAC is designed with a minimum of N+1 redundancy for a consistent, reliable operating environment.
Enterprise physical security
On-site security personnel 24/7, motion-sensitive CCTV, card entry with dual-authentication, and individually locking racks. Every visitor and access event is logged and auditable.
Remote Hands
Up to 30 minutes per rack per month of in-person Data Centre Engineer assistance included as standard. Tasks include switching power supplies, changing cables, or physical router resets.
Cross-connects & cabling
Additional fibre or copper connections between your racks and other locations within the building are available, commonly used to connect third-party network services or reach carrier-neutral meet-me rooms.
Fire detection & suppression
VESDA (Very Early Smoke Detection Apparatus) with air sampling across all data halls, double-knock detection configuration, and fire suppression systems safe for electronic equipment.
UK-based data residency
Where your hardware physically sits matters - for procurement policy, for regulatory expectation, and increasingly for board-level risk registers. With Claranet Colocation, you choose a UK-based facility and your hardware stays there, under your control, for as long as your contract runs. Because you own and manage everything from the operating system up, you retain full visibility over where your data is processed and who can access it.
This makes colocation a straightforward way to satisfy an in-country data residency requirement. It's worth distinguishing that from data sovereignty, which concerns which country's laws ultimately govern your data and infrastructure, not only its physical location. If you need a fully managed platform with an active UK-jurisdiction guarantee across the whole stack, our Claranet Sovereign Cloud service is built and operated entirely in the UK for exactly that purpose. Many customers combine the two: sovereign-hosted workloads on managed infrastructure, alongside colocated hardware for systems they need to keep direct physical control of.
Want to understand the difference between data residency and data sovereignty in more depth? Our blog breaks down what each actually means for your compliance position.
Accreditations & partnerships
Our data centres are independently accredited to recognised international standards, giving you audit-ready evidence for your own compliance and due-diligence requirements: ISO 22301 (business continuity), ISO 9001 (quality management), ISO 27001 (information security), PCI-DSS (payment card data security), Cyber Essentials Plus (UK government-backed cyber security certification), and ASHRAE-aligned cooling design.
Proven in production
Facilities management group Kier consolidated an IT estate spread across ten data centres — the result of a string of acquisitions — into two colocation facilities and a private cloud environment, cutting cost and complexity as the first step on a wider cloud journey.
Digital fraud prevention company Sift combined a fully managed platform with Claranet colocation space for its own hardware, freeing its technical team to focus on its application layer rather than managing physical infrastructure.
Ready to give your hardware a proper home?
Whether you need a single quarter rack or multiple full cabinets, our data centre team will help you find the right configuration for your requirements.
Discuss your data centre requirements
Or call us on 0330 390 0507
Frequently asked questions
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Colocation and public cloud solve different problems, and most organisations end up using both. Colocation makes sense when you already own hardware you want to keep running, when you have licensing, performance or compliance reasons to control your own infrastructure stack, or when a predictable, fixed-cost footprint suits your budgeting better than consumption-based cloud pricing. Public and managed cloud make more sense for workloads that need to scale up and down quickly, or where you'd rather hand over day-to-day infrastructure management entirely. Many of our customers run both side by side — explore our managed cloud services to see the other side of the picture.
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Colocation tends to suit organisations that have outgrown an on-premises server room, are consolidating hardware from multiple sites or legacy facilities, run specialist or licensed systems that need to stay on hardware they own and control, or operate in regulated sectors where infrastructure location matters. Not sure whether colocation, cloud, or a mix of both is right for you? Our blog post, Cloud-first, hybrid or on-prem? What's right for your business?, walks through the trade-offs in more detail.
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Yes - colocation rarely stands alone. Most of our customers pair their colocated hardware with one or more of Claranet's connectivity, cloud and security services: private, low-latency connections to AWS and Azure with Cloud Connect X, managed network and connectivity services including SD-WAN and dedicated Ethernet, and cyber security solutions to protect infrastructure you manage alongside infrastructure we do.
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Our standard rack options are built for typical enterprise IT infrastructure rather than the very high power densities that large-scale AI or GPU deployments often require. If you have a specific high-density or AI infrastructure requirement, speak to our data centre team directly so we can confirm what's genuinely achievable for your workload.