To Host Or Not to Host, That is the Question

This is the scratchy head topic that all forward-thinking businesses deliberate on. It is a subject of great financial debate for companies, small to large and the decision to host or not to host can either save you money or pour much needed cash-flow from your IT budget straight down the drain. However, there is sound reasoning for the decision to use hosted solutions and we will discuss the pro's and con's so that you can make the right choice for your company, when the inevitable discussion arises over the boardroom table.

You may have seen lots of interesting offers about "cloud services" and "business virtualisation" but at the end of it all, there is no better word for hosted services than 'hosting'. Hosting is for ease of understanding, internet-accessible hardware. What I mean by this is that all of the hardware that would usually be sitting in your internal communication or server room is sitting in someone else's and you have a secure direct tunnel to these systems over your home or office internet connection.

There are many types of hosted solutions on the market such as, dedicated server hosting (individual servers that you have full control over), virtual private server hosting (multiple software-based servers spread over a single hardware server), managed hosting (services that are managed by your hosting company rather than you), unmanaged hosting (services that are managed by you with only light support from your hosting company), collocation hosting (your own hardware hosted in another company's data centre), but I am going to concentrate on a particular type of hosting that I would recommend for standard day-to-day business activity. This is managed web and email hosting.

So you're a small company with 5 to 20 staff members thinking about investing in some serious internal hardware and kitting out your office with business servers. Or, let's say you're a medium sized company of 25 to 50 people with 4 to 5+ year old infrastructure acutely thinking it's time for an upgrade. Well, before you start running to your Financial Director or business partner asking to spend anything from £10,000 to £50,000 payable in one go, why not investigate the hosting route as you will not only reduce your immediate financial exposure dramatically, but you will also be investing in business protection, both monetarily speaking and systems-related.

Investing in managed web and email hosting is a very cost effective way of progressing the technology in your company. Your websites and emails are all stored on secure servers outside of your working environment, managed and supported by qualified technical support staff and you have a direct secure tunnel to these servers using your internet connection on your computers or even on your mobile phones. Immediately you have reduced the risk on your business and have set in place reliable continuity elements. In a hosted environment the IT backbone of your company (and for the majority of companies these are your website and emails) resides on an external source and should an emergency occur internally such as an office fire, theft or terrorism, all of your core systems are protected and will remain operational. In addition to this, software/hardware upgrades, service packs, extra modules for your hosted hardware are all handled by your hosting company which enables you to use the latest technology without investing in any further personal time or money. Not to mention the most important part of hosting, a Network Uptime and Service Level Agreement and if you use one of the top hosting companies that provide this at a 100% level, you are guaranteed a 24/7/365 provision on the accessibility and security of your technology or more importantly, your business.

However, should you decide to host your core business solutions internally, you are not only putting all of your eggs in one basket, forced to lay out a tremendous amount of money that for small companies just is not practical in terms of cash-flow, but you also cannot guarantee to customers, investors, shareholders, partners, staff a 100% uptime and are utterly reliant on internal staff for support and additional third parties for countermeasures, all levying costs. Ultimately, should any emergency occur, your business will come to a standstill.

Therefore on security and continuous business activity alone, the financial burden and company exposure of using internal hardware completely outweighs the actual risk of not hosting your core business IT structure. So why isn't everyone using hosted solutions then?

People fear what they cannot see or touch and therefore using hosted services for some is a risk. Since they cannot control the source then it is deemed as being out of their control. However, this is a good thing as that control hinges on the hosting company and they are not only qualified to handle this for you but you pay them for this skilled level of cover. Another reason why companies do not want to use hosted solutions is because they would also be at the mercy of their internet connection. Hang on a minute, if the internet connection goes down at the office with internal business servers they will stop communicating with the outside world. So isn't that the same thing? The answer is 'yes' it is and in the event that your internet connection does go down, savvy companies would have already installed a backup ADSL line for example, which isn't that expensive in order to keep you afloat, or without this, there is simply no difference to the internet connection going down whether you have internally or externally hosted hardware.

There are two other reasons why companies prefer not to host and that is due to migration time and cost. Migration is always a cause for concern for companies because when migrating to hosted services, changes to the DNS Server (Domain Name System) of your domain are necessary. Your DNS is essentially the index for your domain which tells every other nameserver on the internet where your website is stored, how your emails are processed and to which IP address and so on. However, making a change to your DNS requires a process called propagation to occur which is the period when every nameserver refreshes their own directories to pull in any new settings. Nameservers refresh daily but at different times, so there will be occurrences during propagation when your website and emails will be inaccessible or people will report they receive bounce back messages when attempting to email. However, usually 24 to 48 hours after any DNS change, your website and emails are live to everyone on the internet and therefore it is always good practice to make changes on a Friday afternoon to allow propagation to occur during the weekend. You can put in provisions such as using a backup mx record (an entry in your DNS that points emails to a backup mail store in the event of a failure) that will store any emails during this time, as well as always keeping your website on the existing web server so that companies and customers are able to view your website either on the old or new server, dependent at which stage of propagation their nameservers are at. However you do have to allow for the propagation period and the possibility of your website and especially your emails to be down for a brief amount of time.

In terms of migrating and importing web directories and mailboxes to the hosted servers, this is straightforward and is usually handled efficiently by either the company you are purchasing the hosting solution through or a member of your internal IT Department. However, if your business simply cannot afford to be offline even for a single weekend and this will be more prominent in large to corporate companies, then hosting is not for you and you will have to invest in costly internal infrastructure.

Lastly we have the cost implications of hosting. I have already mentioned the acquisition of internal hardware could be in excess of £50,000, but with hosted services, you do not incur high-end financial burdens. There are no one-off purchase costs where you have to consider raising capital or depreciation of hardware, you spread the cost over a period of time. For small companies, the annual total hosting cost would not even equal the full cost of an outright server purchase and for larger companies the cost of hosting is effectively a monthly payment plan, where both scenarios benefit from using servers at the forefront of technology, a dedicated technical support team, business continuity program and a service level agreement. Although you will not be able to position the hosting as a company asset, hosting is in itself an asset for your company in terms of the immediate low financial costs and high protection factor for the daily running of your business.

For these high mission critical systems, the hosting route provides for small and medium companies, an inexpensive, scalable, reliable and supported corporate infrastructure. For larger companies the cost of hosting your website and emails is similar to a standard monthly server support contract, which hosting provides as standard with their service level agreements. I would highly recommend any company, especially small and medium companies who cannot afford to invest in expensive internal hardware, a technical support team and business continuity planning, or need to have their core communication always on and always available, to seriously consider hosted services. We provide web and email hosting as part of our small and medium business solutions, so get in touch with us if you would like a clearer understanding on the benefits of hosting for your company.

To host or not to host, that is the question. I think the question is rather can your business afford not to host?

Article written by David Share, Director of Cobra, an IT Support and Solutions company based in the United Kingdom.