These days, the question isn’t, “Should I outsource hosting?” It’s, “How should I?” and, “With whom should I host?” Every option under the sun is available: free services, expensive managed hosting, and “The Cloud” (an intentionally vague buzzword devised by the industry itself).
Miller Systems Hosting
Miller Systems provides a variety of hosting solutions and services for customers. Any solution Miller Systems hosts is done so in a SAS70 compliant, secure, and highly redundant Tier 1 data center facility.
- Managed hosting in our private cloud
- Managed collocation
- Hosting solution design
- Hybrid Miller/third party cloud solutions
Keys to Successful Hosting
Choosing the right partner – and the right solution style – is a matter of carefully considering costs while weighing risks vs. benefits. These factors vary dramatically depending on what kind of site you’re hosting, the sensitivity of your information, and in the end, how uptime affects your bottom line.
Miller Systems has hosted scores of web sites and applications for well over a decade, from startups to Fortune 500 companies and everyone in between. The technologies have evolved over time, but one thing has remained constant: every customer’s situation is different. Here’s what we’ve learned along the way:
- Deciding between on-premises, colocation, managed hosting, cloud based hosting, or some sort of hybrid approach depends heavily on what you’re running – not what’s trendy or in the news. Deploy what’s appropriate for your technical situation – and tolerance for risk.
- The team responsible for the uptime of your site must be intimately familiar with the applications and content running in your infrastructure. Otherwise, basic troubleshooting and simple maintenance tasks become mountains instead of molehills. A lack of teamwork between developers and infrastructure experts typically results in band-aids for recurring issues, untenable expenses, and unnecessary frustration.
- If your site or application is mission critical, make certain it’s located in a Tier 1 facility. This means serious security, redundancy, bandwidth capacity, power, cooling, fire suppression, round-the-clock staffing, and more.
- Use realistic end-user cases to monitor your site. Can the user log in? Check out? Request a download? A site isn’t necessarily “up” just because it answers a simple ping.
- Take compliance requirements (HIPAA, PCI, SEC, etc.) very seriously when selecting your facility and hosting partner.
- Be as realistic as possible when capacity planning, using as much diagnostic data as available. Financially, over-investing can be just as bad as over-subscribing.
Does Any of This Sound Familiar? Get in Touch
- When my site/app has performance and/or reliability issues, our developers blame our IT guys and vice versa. I need a single point of accountability to manage this – and keep my sanity!
- Our site/app has become increasingly feature rich and complex over the years. Our in-house team can’t realistically manage it anymore; it’s time to outsource.
- I think it makes sense for me to employ virtualization and/or cloud computing to host my site, but I need experienced assistance with the analysis; key decision points, risks, best practices, etc.
- What happens if we “go cloud” and the cloud company goes belly-up, or has a disaster that their DR plan doesn’t cover? How long would it take us to recover? Can we make our own “Plan B”?
- I’m in marketing/operations and I’m redesigning my public web site this year. The IT department has cleared me to outsource hosting to a qualified partner (their plates are full!) I need someone who can speak to me in English – not technical jargon – and help me make the best decision.
- My site goes down too often. What’s worse, I don’t always know when or even why! Surely there’s a more reliable and proactively managed hosting solution available.
- We’re doing a major redesign/rebuild of our site. Is this an opportune time to move it elsewhere when we go live?