Data centre colocation means housing servers you own in a professional facility that supplies power, cooling, security and connectivity. Arke Technologies (Pty) Ltd, in Johannesburg, places and manages client equipment in South African colocation data centres, and designs and runs on-premises server rooms, for mid-sized and large organisations, public bodies and schools.
Colocation (also written co-location, and shortened to colo or coloc) is renting space, power and connectivity for equipment you own, inside a data centre someone else operates. The colocation definition in one line: your servers, their building. The facility provides the rack or cage, conditioned power backed by UPS and generators, cooling, physical security and access to many network carriers.
What server colocation means in practice: your servers, storage and firewalls are mounted in space rented by the rack unit, the half rack or the full rack, and reached through cross-connects to carriers and cloud platforms. Colocation hosting differs from managed hosting: in hosting the provider owns the hardware and rents you a server or a share of one.
We do not own or operate a data centre, which leaves us free to recommend the facility that fits. We run our own servers in Johannesburg, place your equipment in the South African facility that suits your users, carriers and budget, and manage it there under your SLA, alongside the rest of our cloud services.
South Africa's colocation capacity is concentrated in Gauteng and Cape Town. Gauteng's largest facilities cluster in Isando, near OR Tambo International Airport, and in Midrand; our head office in Greenstone Hill is a short drive from Isando. Cape Town has its own cluster, which matters when a disaster-recovery copy should sit far from Johannesburg. Data centre companies in South Africa range from carrier-neutral colocation operators to network operators and the cloud platforms themselves.
The hyperscale clouds run their own South African data centres: AWS operates its Africa (Cape Town) region, Microsoft Azure has regions in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and Google Cloud's region is in Johannesburg. You cannot place equipment in a Google or Amazon data centre, but many colocation facilities offer private connections into those platforms, called cloud on-ramps, which makes a combined data centre and cloud design practical.
Size is measured in megawatts of IT power, not floor area. The largest data centres in the world are hyperscale campuses drawing hundreds of megawatts, and dense GPU servers are raising the power each rack must be supplied with. Which is the biggest data centre in South Africa matters less than data centre locations: the right facility sits near your people and your fibre routes.
We compare the options for your equipment, then colocation providers on location, power per rack, carriers, cloud on-ramps, access rules, contract terms and cost, and set it out in writing before you commit.
We move your equipment into a South African colocation data centre in an agreed window, with a rollback path: labelled, racked, cabled and tested. Out-of-band controllers and metered, switched power strips let us restart a hung server without a site visit; monitoring checks every 15 minutes and raises faults as tickets.
The data centre rack, power, cooling, UPS and IT infrastructure designed and built, with structured cabling certified and documented.
Virtualised clusters on VMware, Hyper-V or Proxmox, designed and run by us in your server room or colocation rack; see private cloud and virtualisation.
Top-of-rack switching, firewalls, cross-connects, VPNs back to your offices, and business fibre for those offices from Fibre Boyz, our connectivity division. Data centre and network operations run as one service; see network infrastructure.
Day-to-day operation under server and infrastructure management.
Each engagement starts with a conversation about what you run, then a written proposal before you commit to anything. Button: Discuss your project
Data centre building at office scale is mostly power, cooling and discipline.
Server Hub, our trading division, supplies the equipment a colocation rack or server room needs, from servers to UPS units, sized to your design, configured and bench-tested before dispatch, priced in rand with VAT included and carrying a local warranty:
Last reviewed: September 2026.
Power is the largest line in most colocation bills and the main driver of data centre power consumption and energy cost. Power usage effectiveness (PUE) divides a facility's total electricity use by what its IT equipment uses: 1.0 would be perfect, and everything above it is cooling, conversion and lighting. At a PUE of 1.5, a server drawing 1 kW makes the building draw 1.5 kW.
For scale, a 600 W server uses about 438 kWh a month, roughly R1,226 of electricity at R2.80/kWh (Server Hub, September 2026), before cooling. Data centre electricity consumption per rack rises sharply with GPU servers, which is why many facilities price power by the committed kilowatt.
Colocation pricing is driven by space (rack units, half or full rack, or a cage), committed power per rack, cross-connects to carriers and clouds, bandwidth, remote-hands time, set-up and contract term. We publish no colocation prices; we cost the options for your equipment after an assessment and show you every line.
Facilities control access tightly: visits are booked ahead, identity is checked, many require induction training, and many restrict pictures in the data hall. Everyone on our side with access to your equipment is bound by confidentiality and our security controls. Before you sign, we confirm that the facility logs every visit; every remote session we open is approved and logged, so both halves of the access record are ready for an auditor.
