What Are the Criteria for Colocation Selection?

Most companies start the colocation search the same way: they Google “data centers near me,” pull up a few websites, and start comparing spec sheets. But specs can’t tell you how fast someone picks up the phone when something breaks at 2 am on a Tuesday. That part you only find out when you actually need it.

There is a difference between a facility that checks every box on paper and one that operates well in practice. The criteria for colocation selection are not complicated. But they do require you to look past the brochure.

Here is what you need to look for before you commit.

Where the Facility Sits

Not just the city. The actual geography. A data center placed near a floodplain or in a region that loses power during wildfire season carries a different risk profile than one sitting at high elevation in a low-humidity climate. Both might be “near Denver” on a map.

Network latency is the other location story. Physical distance between your facility and your end users adds milliseconds, and milliseconds compound. If your team ever needs to physically access your equipment, proximity matters differently. A five-hour drive to swap a drive under pressure is a five-hour problem.

Novva’s colocation data centers are located in Salt Lake City, Colorado Springs, Las Vegas, Tahoe Reno, San Francisco, and Mesa. Each location was chosen deliberately for fiber density, climate efficiency, power costs, and regional connectivity, not simply because real estate was available.

Power: The Question Behind the Question

Every provider will tell you they have redundant power. Push past that. Ask how fast the switchover happens during a grid event, what the battery runtime looks like before generators engage, and whether the facility can sustain full load on backup power or partial operations.

The Uptime Institute’s Tier Classification System benchmarks top-tier facilities at 99.982% uptime. That number translates to roughly 90 minutes of downtime per year, total. Read SLA language carefully; some providers commit to that standard, others hedge with language around “planned maintenance” that carves out exceptions.

Redundancy on paper is not the same as redundancy that holds under conditions. Ask if you can see the maintenance logs. A good operator will not flinch at that request.

Cooling: Where the Environmental and Operational Costs Meet

Cooling is usually the last thing buyers think about and one of the first things that causes problems. Underpowered cooling drives up server failure rates and silently inflates your power bill. Wasteful cooling systems consume millions of gallons of water annually, a material issue in the Western U.S. and an increasingly significant one for corporate sustainability reporting.

Novva’s facilities use water-free ambient air cooling. That means we leverage a desert’s low humidity to cool the data hall directly, shifting to a closed-loop chiller only when outside temps spike.

For AI and high-density compute workloads, verify that a prospective facility can sustain cooling at the rack density your workload demands. Many older facilities were not built for it.

Security That Goes Beyond a Badge Reader

A colocation data center has multiple layers of security. Getting into the building is one. But your servers sit in a cage inside the building, and controlling who gets near that cage and tracking what they do there is more complicated.

At Novva, we run 24/7 on-site security teams alongside biometric access controls and continuous video surveillance. We have deployed autonomous drones and robotic monitoring across our campuses. That combination picks up things that cameras and guards might miss.

On the network side, ask about carrier diversity. Blended bandwidth from multiple carriers means one provider going down doesn’t take your connection with it. If a provider can’t answer that question clearly, that’s a red flag.

Can It Scale With You

A lot of companies sign a colocation contract sized for today and then spend the next two years fighting for additional capacity in a facility that was not built to give it to them. Growth conversations should happen before you sign, not after.

The practical questions:

• Can you expand within your current footprint?
• What does a move from a shared cage to a private suite involve?
• Is there wholesale space on the same campus if you eventually need it?

Novva supports requirements from 250kW to 30MW and has campus development underway that scales well beyond that. Clients can move between footprint types without relocating infrastructure to a different facility entirely.

Compliance Is Your Problem Too

Healthcare organizations, financial institutions, and government agencies do not get to outsource their compliance posture to a colocation provider. But they do inherit some of it. If your provider cannot demonstrate ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certification, you are carrying their compliance risk.

ISO 27001 and SOC 2 require ongoing audits, documented controls, and independent validation. They are not something you earn once and forget. Novva has both certifications, which matters to every regulated client we work with.

The Sustainability Calculus

Scope 3 emissions accounting is turning “what is your facility’s energy source” from a nice-to-have question into a required one. If your organization has public carbon commitments, your data infrastructure’s footprint is part of what you are reporting on.

Novva runs on renewable energy and has built sustainability into the physical design of every campus, from the cooling architecture to construction choices. That is not peripheral to how we operate. It is foundational to it.

Support: Test It Before You Need It

Remote hands, on-site technical support, and incident response matter most at 3 am when something has gone wrong and your nearest engineer is four states away.

Before signing with any colocation provider, ask how they handle an incident.

Better yet, call their support line and see how fast someone picks up and how much they know. Novva’s operations teams use augmented reality-assisted training to maintain technical precision across complex tasks. What that means is faster resolution and fewer errors when something needs hands-on attention.

Schedule a Tour

The criteria for colocation selection are not a mystery: Location, power, cooling, security, scalability, compliance, sustainability, and support. What makes the evaluation hard is that every provider checks most of those boxes in their sales deck.

That’s why it’s important to dig into the specifics and tour the facility.

A site tour is the single most useful step in this process. You learn more walking a data center floor for 45 minutes than you do reading three months of documentation.

Why Novva

Novva Data Centers was built for the Western U.S. market, in regions chosen for their power costs, climate efficiency, and fiber access. We are committed to upholding security, sustainability, and infrastructure standards that keep pace with the technology.

We work with enterprises, AI organizations, government agencies, healthcare systems, and financial institutions. The range of clients we serve reflects the range of what our facilities were designed to handle.

Want to see it firsthand? Reach out to schedule a tour of the Novva location that makes the most sense for your business. We will show you what the infrastructure looks like and answer the questions that matter before you make the decision.