News

The following article was written by Aaron Larkins and appeared in the Cincinnati Business Courier.

What web hosting platform is appropriate for your business?

For executives in emerging and medium sized companies, it’s a question that is not asked enough. To be certain, many companies have already outsourced their web hosting to an ISP, web design firm, managed hosting provider or college student with a server. In many cases, the recommendation on who to partner with and what platform to use has been made by a third party such as an IT consultant, web designer or the spring intern. For many businesses who continue to invest in online initiatives, the choices of an appropriate hosting platform and partner are critical.

Outsourcing a company’s online operations can take a variety of forms including:

	Shared Hosting: The company rents data storage on a multi-client web server managed by the vendor.
	Managed Dedicated Hosting: The vendor provides and manages a server platform exclusively for your business.
	Self-Managed Dedicated Hosting Dedicated hosting server(s) owned by the vendor are located in a data center for your use. The client has responsibility for server administration, patches, security, backup and incident response.
	Colocation or Cage Space The client rents space off-site at a data center for servers and network devices such as a switch, load balancer, firewall or backup device. The client has complete responsibility for the devices and often contracts with the vendor for managed services.

Assess Existing Risks

Before making a decision on what hosting platform to purchase and who to partner with, executives should evaluate the importance of their website availability to daily business operations. Specifically, how would a site or email outage, loss of data or security breach affect customers and your employees’ ability to do their jobs? What is the impact to your brand or image if your site is slow or fails to load? How many sales inquiries are lost due to spam or outages?

Shared hosting is a viable option for small companies who require basic storage of website files, images and email. Managed hosting, unmanaged hosting and colocation solutions are designed for companies who continue to integrate their website and applications into daily business operations. A dedicated solution allows a higher level of security when confidential customer data is collected for applications, sales inquiries, online bill payment or ecommerce transactions. Organizations such as banks or credit unions, health care or others bound by regulatory compliance or intellectual property concerns should research dedicated server solutions.

Unlimited Anything has a Cost

Hosting companies tend to compete for your dollar by over promising unbelievable value (unlimited bandwidth, storage, server features) with hopes that clients do not use what is promised. The next time you receive an offer for shared hosting for $9.95 per month, throw it away. In shared hosting it is common for some providers to cut corners by placing 500 to 1,000 customers on the cheapest servers available. In managed hosting some providers purchase used or outdated hardware and package it as leading edge equipment available for your use.

It is also common for hosts to leave systems unprotected from vulnerabilities as evidenced by a recent UK National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre (NISCC) test that reported 49,535 sites were vulnerable to serious OpenSSL security exploits dating back to 2002. The Slammer Virus is another example of a preventable server vulnerability that cost businesses $1.2 billion in its first five days (Source: Mi2G).

Ask the Right Questions

Executives need to move beyond basic feature comparison and low price cost models and start asking their hosting partner questions such as:

	How is our business data secured?
	How do you monitor and measure your network and server uptime?
	What is the anticipated uptime of shared hosting vs. managed dedicated hosting?
	How accessible is support during and after business hours?
	What is your spare parts policy for critical systems and network devices?
	What level of fault tolerance is built into our solution?
	May we tour your data center?
	What customer references may we contact?

Additionally a provider should be willing to discuss physical security, data backup, patch management, incident response and vulnerability assessment procedures.

Is it necessary to find a new hosting provider tomorrow? It is if they are not willing to answer basic questions relevant to your risk management strategy. Similar to a stock market disclaimer, a hosting companies past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. While no host can guarantee 100% performance, your money is better spent with local web hosting providers and developers who will personally work with your company to review your business requirements and implement an appropriate level of security, redundancy and data protection for your organization.