hosted data center: some items to consider

More and more companies are starting to consider managed hosting services for their online content data centers. If you are going down this path there are a few things you should consider. The quality of your online services are directly affected by the hosting facility you are using so in addition to cost you need to make sure that the hosting facility you select can provide (a) extremely high availability rates, (b) scalability for future growth and (c) excellent data center technical staffing and customer service.

When it comes to availability it is best to do your own independent research. Although companies can promise 100% network uptime the forums and reviews will actually provide you with when their last outages were and how they responded. Don’t forget to be specific about redundancy and disaster recovery.

Make sure the servers that are available are scalable and still have an upgrade path (in case you experience a sudden spike in network traffic). Ask for the configurations and try to align with what you would do in house if you had to. Things you should be considering: aggregate bandwidth (outbound and inbound), server specs (single or dual processor, dual or quad core, memory, etc), SAN requirements, software (e.g. SQL server), VPN access, firewall, load balancing, managed backup, analytics and logging.

Again, when it comes to staffing and customer service, the company provided literature gives you the offerings but the hosting forums will actually tell you the experience. Also, you can always check out if there have been any complaints with the Better Business Bureau.

Also, you should consider the contractual length of your relationship. Some are month to month while others try to lock you in for 3 years. If the equipment is current generation it should perform well over a period of time however we recommend you negotiate 2 years which gives you the ability to upgrade your data center infrastructure as needed then.

Finally, if you do go with a hosted data center with cache, like say Rackspace or DataPipe, you could potentially include this in your marketing initiatives. By using a provider with a positive reputation in the hosting industry you stand to gain more by telling your customers you use a very reliable hosting solution.

Here is a good article by TheHN and also provides a good resource for hosting information and links to reviews, etc. Just a little something to get you started.