Selecting a Hosting Company for Your Big-Time Web Site, Part Two
This is part two of a seven-part article. You might want to start at the beginning.
September 15, 1999
Should the Web servers be in our office or with a hosting service?
There are plenty of arguments on both sides of this question and I’ll cover both sides here a bit but you’ll soon see where my sympathies lie. You’re going to have to pay substantially either way and I don’t think there are big economies one way or the other. If your servers need to be monitored around the clock, by alert, awake engineers however, it will be much cheaper to place your servers where others share that expense. Engineers can monitor a lot of sites at the same time. Unless your existing business operations include such mission-critical server monitoring already, you just about have to outsource it.
You can pay for a big fat pipe to your office and keep the actual computers running your Web site in a corner or closet somewhere. It feels nice to actually have the equipment where you can see it and fiddle with it if needed. I run into a lot of people advocating hosting their servers in house. They probably won’t even admit it to themselves, but I suspect part of their reason for wanting to host in-house is because they like the idea of having a fat pipe into the office so their own surfing speeds will be higher. This is of course, fuzzy thinking. Remember that we’re talking about high-performance, mission-critical sites – not high speed surfing for your technical staff. Better access for your office is a separate issue. If needed you can put in a, secure, high-speed, dedicated connection from your office to your out-sourced Web servers.
If your Web server is in a closet in your office, even if it is a real nice, proper server cabinet with air conditioning and fans and UPS, what is going to happen if your server goes down at 2:00 Sunday morning? Will you even know it’s down? If it’s hosted with a professional hosting service they have personnel on site 24 by 7 monitoring all the sites they host. If your site is hosed, the monitoring staff follows pre-arranged instructions as to what to do in each type of crisis – call your technical lead, try to fix it themselves, or whatever suits you.
People arguing for in house hosting will say you can run a clever utility that constantly polls the server to see if it is still alive and sends a beeper message to someone important when things go pear-shaped. Sounds like a good idea but let’s think about what really happens at 2:00 Sunday morning when the beeper goes off. The person charged with beeper duty will probably drag out of bed and either call someone else on the technical team (not knowing what else to do) or go to their home computer, turn it on and try to log into the Web site to see if it’s really down. Then they may actually get dressed and drive down to the office to start fiddling with things. So it could easily be an hour or more before anyone actually starts to look at what’s wrong.
When I was head of the Internet department at Gateway 2000 we were grossing well over $1 million per day in direct Web orders. If we were down for an hour or two hours how much would we loose? You do the math. In that situation we simply could not even consider anything other than 24 hour, 7 day a week supervision of our servers. The beeper thing is not enough in such a situation. We needed instant attention, around the clock, from someone who knew what they’re doing. We hosted our Web servers with a service that had trained system administrators on site, around the clock. Yes, such service costs more. But at this point the decision comes down to very simple math. How much does it cost you to be down? How much of that down time can you afford? How much downtime can you expect in, say a year? Don’t kid yourself – you will have some. How much does it cost to have around-the-clock attention? How much down time might that service save you?
Once you get used to it, it won’t really hurt that you can’t easily touch your servers. Although it’s hard for some systems administrators to swallow, once your Web server systems are set up, configured and running, there is not much need to actually touch them again. Running UNIX systems, you can remotely manage almost everything you’ll need to mess with. With NT you can install LapLink or PC Anywhere and do almost as much remotely.
Hosting services usually supply you with an already configured router and can offer front-line firewall solutions. These are both things I suggest you don’t try at home. They are neither fun nor cheap. Among techies, guys that can configure routers are well respected for the skill. Security is a big subject of its own and I suggest letting experts who deal with security issues constantly handle the issue.
Outsourcing It is Less Mess
There are a variety of companies offering proper, commercial hosting services at all levels. After considering your business needs and how reliable your site needs to be, you can list the services you need and compare hosting companies. If your site must be available absolutely all the time, you need a more serious hosting solution.
