infoTECH Feature

April 30, 2015

Hosting Cheat Sheet

By TMCnet Special Guest
Jeffrey Papen, CEO and Founder, Peak Hosting

Companies have many options when it comes to choosing the hosting option that best meets their needs—from getting started to long-term viability. These options range from cloud hosting to managed hosting to a do-it-yourself approach.

We’ve created this Hosting Cheat Sheet to provide companies with insight into the pros and cons of each hosting option and how each option stacks up during the various lifecycle stages of a company. But first, let’s take a look at the critical questions to ask when evaluating your hosting options:

  • Does my service need to be available 24/7?
  • What would the financial impact be to my company should my service go down or if performance is sluggish?
  • Will the hosting solution scale with me as my company grows?
  • How much visibility do I want into my hosting solution?
  • Am I prepared to share hardware resources? 
  • How much infrastructure do I want to maintain in-house?
  • What technical support do I have on staff to support my hosting solution?
  • What are the cost implications (monthly hosting fees, technical support, infrastructure, etc.) for my company for each hosting option? Where do I want to put my resources?
  • Does doing it all myself give me a strategic advantage over my competition?

Once you know the answers to these questions, you can evaluate each hosting option to see which solution will best meet your needs.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting, also known as infrastructure-as-a-service, provides businesses with access to computing resources in a virtualized environment across a public connection. Specifically, the resource provided is virtualized hardware, including virtual server space, network connections, bandwidth, IP addresses and load balancers. In physical terms, the hardware is drawn from a multitude of servers and networks that exist across any number of dispersed data centers, all of which the cloud provider is responsible for maintaining. 

Pros:

  • Elasticity is a native feature that requires no additional effort to design and configure
  • Provides an easy point of entry for start-ups

Cons:

  • The agility that cloud provides requires paying a significantly higher premium
  • Oversubscription means that the resources might not be there when you need them
  • There’s no certainty around capacity because performance doesn’t scale linearly
  • A small VM and a giant physical server take the same amount of work to manage, but requires managing significantly more instances
  • Cloud is self-service and the cost of sourcing, training, and maintaining technical operations staff does not synergize with core objectives
  • Cloud is unable to meet performance requirements for Big Data applications

Company Lifecycle Stage: When to Use the Cloud

  • If you’re just starting out and primarily focused on using the cloud for development and testing, rather than in a production environment
  • If you’re a business that does a lot of sporadic batch computing; If your workload isn’t 24/7, the cloud can be a good choice

Managed Hosting

Managed Hosting provides customers with “ownership” of the hardware and greater control over the resources that are housed in the hosting provider’s data center. What this means is that managed hosting customers have their own dedicated servers—they are not sharing server space with other companies— without the overhead cost of actually purchasing the hardware. Managed Hosting vendors typically also provide administration and other services including operating systems, software and security systems. 

Pros:

  • Customize configurations to be cost efficient from two servers to a thousand servers
  • Leverage shared network and data center infrastructure that you would otherwise need to acquire for DIY
  • Reduces the cost of infrastructure and provides exactly as much capacity as is paid for
  • Reduces architectural complexity, improving performance and visibility
  • Outsources technical operations instead of building an in-house technical operations team
  • Reduced capital and operational expenditure as compared to an in-house DIY solution
  • Greater reliability and performance compared to typical cloud environments
  • Greater flexibility to add software and operating systems, as well as the ability to change server configurations

Cons:

  • Does not provide as much flexibility as a DIY solution
  • You need to trust that your provider knows what it is doing; this can be difficult to verify until after a migration and you’re locked in

Company Lifecycle Stage: When to Use Managed Hosting

  • If your company is growing and needs a hosting solution that can scale with it
  • If you can forecast your company’s traffic or if your company’s website needs to be up 24/7 with no service interruptions
  • When you want to keep company resources focused on core competencies rather than on building out a technical operations team to support growth

Do-It-Yourself (DIY) or Colocation

DIY is exactly what it sounds like. With this hosting option, a company is responsible for its entire hosting solution from purchasing hardware to designing the architecture, building the solution and managing all technical operations. In a Colocation scenario, the facility provides the data center (power, security, HVAC) and Internet connectivity, with the customer responsible for all other hardware (servers, SAN, switches, load balancers, etc.)

Pros:

  • Control everything from architecture to hardware to operational procedures
  • Get full visibility into the infrastructure supporting your application to improve tuning and troubleshooting
  • Most cost effective at massive scale when you have buying power and economies of scale

Cons:

  • Total cost of ownership is difficult to justify until you’re using thousands of servers
  • Running a data center soups to nuts is difficult to do well and technical operations does not synergize with core objectives

Company Lifecycle Stage: When to Do It All In-House

  • Congrats! You’ve hit it big! Your company relies on thousands and thousands of servers to support all of its traffic.  

About the Author: Jeffrey Papen is the founder and CEO of Peak Hosting, the leading provider of Operations-as-a-ServiceSM managed hosting. 




Edited by Dominick Sorrentino
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