Co-location refers to the way IT equipment and resources are located or installed. This usually refers to the networking hardware resources owned by an organization, such as Web or database servers, which are located outside the vicinity of the organization's premises and "co-located" with another organization's hardware, usually an ISP or a service provider. This is usually done because the ISP might be the best candidate for maintaining the Web server hardware for the organization and it would be better to keep the hardware in a more suitable place since ISPs have specially built places for networking hardware.