opus:interactive | If These Servers Could Talk

Monday, January 29, 2007 at 10:32 am by Jeremy Sherwood

Part I: What type of hosting services do you need?

Managed Servers and Colocation are hot topics throughout the northwest. If you have been exploring hosting options I’m sure the question “What is better dedicated managed servers or collocating servers?” has come to mind. I generally respond with 3 buckets to assist clients in there search for service. These buckets help identify what you need and from whom. They are “You Do”, “I Do” and “We Do”.

The first bucket is “You Do.” This bucket is as it sounds, that you want someone to take care of all your services. Generally speaking this is what is called a Managed Server Solution or Dedicated Server. You pay trained certified technicians to managed servers, operating systems, applications, database, firewalls, security, disaster recovery, data back etc all in a secure data center facility. This solution is really designed for those companies who don’t want the headaches and responsibility of managing the upkeep of servers. A good number of companies use this solution so they don’t acquire any assets the depreciate and have a life cycle of about 3 years. This solutions is more of a worries free and headache free solution. The “You Do” is growing rapidly as more and more companies want to focus on there core business and not have to worry about the technical side of things.

The Second bucket is “I Do.” This bucket is really designed for the do it yourselfers out there. Colocation space is really what you need. You rent space just like you might at the gym for a locker to put your clothes in. You have your clothes and you just need a safe place to put them while you work out. Colocation of servers is very similar. You rent secure space, power, cooling, and connectivity for your servers. The biggest advantages of doing this are network reliability and guaranteed uptime. Yes I know, there are a lot of companies that have servers under someone’s desk or in some back closet, but that being said, you are only as strong as your weakest link. What happens when your internet goes down, or you lose power? What about the security of someone coming into your office space, or on those really hot summer days that broom closet gets pretty hot? The answer is trouble. The cost for that is far more expensive than to rent space in a facility. Besides this way if something were to go wrong you have someone else to blame, and generally you receive refunds for any outages.

The final bucket is “We Do.” This is really the best in both worlds. It truly is the buffet of services. You pick what services you would like to add to your current, or new solution, and how much control, or level of responsibility, you wish to have. All three buckets are great because the features they address to each unique business.

Now the real big question is what provider should I pick? We’ll answer that question in our next entry. Stay tuned.

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