Co-location Centers
Most web hosting companies don’t own their own data centers, in fact most web hosting companies (there are over 25,000 companies which have been started as a web hosting service provider, don’t even own their own servers… they are resellers. More about that later but most web hosting companies co-locate their servers in a building like One Wilshire in downtown Los Angeles. One Wilshire is a data center, it used to be full of Lawyers but they kicked them out & put in servers instead and the building is equiped as a large scale data facility with the capabilities of dividing the resources for various companies who need space, power, bandwidth and securities for their servers.
Man y tims you will see several competitor companies sharing the same building or even the same floor within a co-location facility. What you want to look for in terms of a data center and what they offer to their web hosting clients, to make sure that if you have a dedicated server or a shared web hosting account is that the building has adequate power, that they have partnered with their tier 1 bandwidth providers, that they have security and backup power procedures on site.