Editorial Articles

Business application and website hosting can be a minefield of jargon for the uninitiated. There are lots of new suppliers and services to think about so over the next few paragraphs I will attempt to explain what the important considerations are.

The first question is whether you want to manage the service in-house or have it managed for you? Should you choose to go the in-house route, the main things to consider here are physical security, fire protection, backup power supplies and internet connectivity. In addition to this you have to think of the IT resource you have available, the capital and operational expense and above all how you will get data off-site as part of your disaster recovery policy.

If you don’t want to manage these issues or are not confident in your own resources, then outsourcing your hosting is probably the best route to follow, often offering a better return on investment. I have probably made this too ‘black and white’ an issue, but in practice organisations generally either want the in-house control or they want the peace of mind that it is taken care of by an external hosting company.

Two things I haven’t mentioned here are environmental issues and cloud computing. A hosting company will make the best use of equipment and run it efficiently by centralising its resources across multiple clients. In addition, most hosting companies now use virtualisation technology to make sure it reduces the carbon footprint of the managed information by running multiple ‘virtual’ servers on one physical piece of hardware. Think of this as the equivalent of one bus versus many cars on the road. By sharing and optimising resource not only is the cost reduced, but so also is the amount of power needed to run the same resource. Highly efficient servers in ‘the cloud’ give better and more efficient performance for most users.

So let’s for arguments sake say you have decided that it’s time to outsource your hosting services, the question is what issues do you now have to consider? The first is whether you share a section of rack space in a secure data centre with other companies or do you want a dedicated server just for you? Again this depends on your business requirements and levels of security. Most companies, for example a bank, would not share a server with other banks but would probably be happy to share a secure data centre. However, having your own dedicated servers or virtual servers, gives you greater flexibility and allows bespoke solution architecture, together with the benefits of higher service level agreements, greater control of data and high speed connectivity from multiple carriers.

An outsourced Storage Area Network (SAN) based solution using virtualisation software is pretty much the best Hosting platform you could use. It is efficient, shares data across multiple servers and disks – so is resilient (100% uptime service level guarantees are normally offered on this type of system) and it is secure. It gives you the cost and speed advantages that ensure you will not have problems in the event of a disaster. It also provides you with a fast, simple and cost-effective ability to increase the amount of storage you have access to.

You have to think of what you are hosting. An on-line system, like a SQL database or an ecommerce website, needs to be up and running 100% of the time. Selecting the correct hosting environment for your particular applications is the important thing to consider.

Tim Walker
Managing Director, Iconnyx Ltd
http://twitter.com/Iconnyx