The decision to host your IT infrastructure

Blog author: Sean McDonald (Former ICONZ CEO)

Welcome to my very first blog post.

In this article and many others that will follow I will present opinion on issues that relate both to our company, ICONZ and the hosting industry in general. Not being an uber-technologist or an accountant I have a reasonable grasp on reality and simple speak so you can expect to see good old straight forward talking from yours truly.

The answer lies in the question..

The server hosting ecosphere is a very busy neighbourhood in New Zealand. How can IT practitioners cut through the marketing hype and choose the right provider for their needs? Before the answer, there are almost as many additional questions to be asked as there are service providers.

Like many things though, the answer generally comes from a simple question asked, well it should at least!

For life in the hosting world, I would suggest that the question should always be “what is my strategy for success”? Not ‘what is the cheapest hosting option I can find”? As technology evolves and it becomes easier for companies and individuals to present as ‘world class providers’, one must be ever more vigilant and check the credentials of the provider they are looking to engage.  

Making the decision to host your IT infrastructure is a complicated task—so complicated, in fact, that business executives sometimes shudder at the mere thought of attempting this arduous task. But as hard as it is, navigating the decision process can be easy if you focus on the above question: "What is my strategy for success"? In other words, if your business or application is an instant sensation in the market, how will you scale to meet the demand and not end up with spagetti on your head when things go pear shaped?

A success strategy must be built into your IT plans from day one. This includes laying out plans for your server hosting needs, support, supply chain, features, operating system and the all important service levels you require. Is it just New Zealand business clients and hours you are after or is 24 x 7 global coverage what you looking for? Do you need consider translating your site later on to cater for markets outside New Zealand? 

So what are the options you have for Hosting?

Well as you would expect, there are a plethora of options, all of which I talk about in another of my whitepapers called ‘assessing the hosting options’. Shared hosting, dedicated servers, co-located servers, or cloud hosting are all great options but choosing the right solution for your company is easier if you keep the original question in mind: “What is my strategy for success?” To provide answers to the all important question, let’s look at these core hosting options.   

Shared Hosting

Shared web hosting is the ‘bread and butter’ hosting platform of the web development world. Most small websites start out life on a shared hosting platform. In this environment, many different clients (100s) share the same server and the same resources. While each client has their own limits on certain things (storage space, allowed email accounts, allowed bandwidth per month, allowed FTP accounts), the same server and physical memory are shared.

Co location

The first alternative to DIY other than ‘in your garage at home or the office’ is co location. In the main cities across New Zealand there are vendors that rent out space in their data centres such as ICONZ do. They/we supply the server cabinets, Internet connection, power, environmental controls and physical security while you own the gear and maintain it yourself including the OS, software and licenses. While outsourcing physical space and power is very helpful, responding to success will involve the same challenges as self-hosting—manpower, knowledge, readiness.

Managed Hosting

Another viable option is managed hosting. Here the value proposition changes as you no longer have to worry about running a set of servers in a data centre. Even better, you also don’t have to worry about owning the hardware as it can be provided for you as part of the monthly service fee.

Servers can be added with a single phone call, so the hardware aspect of your success strategy becomes simpler. The hosting service provider maintains the hardware and the operating system, keeping it patched and secure. You only need to worry about your business applications.

Cloud Hosting

The next level is the ‘cloud’, what? Yes, the cloud, where the hosting service maintains the hardware, the operating system as well as the programming interfaces. Why cloud? Who really knows? It got its name by its association with the internet. Really? But then isn’t everything cloud? I rest my point...silly isn’t it?

Cloud hosting is just a whole heap of really powerful servers clustered together with a bunch of memory (RAM) and space (disk) at the ready, overlaid with some clever virtualisation software that make them all appear like individually powerful servers in their own right. The even clever part is that it works, and very well.

The more advanced hosting providers offer cloud hosting on high spec blade servers and high speed SAN infrastructure which provide the same essential service but with many different levels of performance and availability (uptime) which is very important when you are considering hosting database intensive web applications and sites that will generate huge volumes of traffic or data read/write calls.

In the ‘cloud’ world, there are many pretenders so be careful and make sure you check the credentials of your provider. It’s sometimes the wild-wild west out there and it’s your business application, data and clients we are talking about after all.

With cloud hosting, you only pay for the compute resources you use, reducing capital expenditure, and you can scale your usage to meet fluctuating user demands. Everything necessary for a success strategy is offered by the cloud vendor—except that you are limited to the cloud's APIs and the programming languages the cloud supports. There are many different types of cloud offerings emerging from the more experienced providers, such as complete shared environments, servers that you can use for days or weeks at a time through to standalone and dedicated private cloud setups that give you ultimate control over your hosted cloud environment. 

What to consider when choosing a hosting service

Regardless of the hosting service you choose, there are several key factors you should consider in any solution.

Exceptional Customer Service

No, a mobile phone number on a website just won’t cut it I’m afraid! Your ideal provider will ensure you have an expert account team that is well versed in your specific business. They will also have on-call technical representatives to provide assistance 24 x 7 everyday of the year.

In the unlikely circumstance that a crisis does arise, it is essential you have the utmost confidence that your account and service team is working around the clock to ensure your IT environment is brought back to normal with as little interruption to your mission critical operations as possible.

Reliability

Look for a solution that provides guaranteed quality of service agreements, service level agreements (SLA’s), and comprehensive disaster recovery plans and back-up. If the hosting company is not willing provide guarantees of up-time for your environment that should signal some caution for the IT decision makers. Choosing the wrong partner could lead to serious consequences.

Does your hosting provider offer backup services at all? In the cloud world, this is often overlooked. There are constant reports and complaints from customers of cloud providers with the astonished, “but we assumed everything was backed up”? The next thing once you have found this ‘tick in the box’ is, what type of backup service do they have? Can I recover my servers and files instantly, up to 30 days, a year? How is this done? Be sure to ask the question and understand the answer.

Scalability

This is a key factor to consider when selecting a hosted solution. Consider the following situation – if your product or application is mentioned and praised in the media as ‘The next big thing’, traffic to your web site could skyrocket and without the proper hosted solution supporting your business, you could very easily find your site down and you will lose valuable business opportunities. The ideal hosting solution will grow with you through this increased activity and ensure uptime to your site, regardless of traffic levels.

In  Summary

If success is in your future, you must have a strategy for dealing with the surging traffic that it will bring. Choosing the right hosting service and service provider must be a central part of that strategy to ensure your business has the support necessary to sustain growth. A prepared plan is the difference between getting through the labyrinth, or getting stuck in a series of dead-ends.