Considerations before choosing a dedicated provider
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So your company has been up and running on the Internet for a couple of years and is poised to cash in on those elusive online dollars. The problem is, you don’t have the bandwidth or budget to deliver a system that can take your company’s web operation from mere curiosity to a mission-critical business application.

The solution? Let a dedicated web hosting provider host your site. It’s an easy move that can free you from some of the expense and hassle of managing a large hosting operation. Of course, the list of hosting providers that can deliver high quality services robust enough to manage an e-commerce site is fairly short. It is important to choose a provider who has an established reputation, industrial-strength facilities and is responsive to customer support enquiries.

If your Web site is important to your business you need to ensure that your customers can access it 24 hours a day - 365 days a year.

The most common cause of downtime is not inadequate site infrastructure, but inadequate management of the application. If you need 24 x 365 availability, attention must be paid to the environment into which you develop your application and, critically, the monitoring and management regime you put in place.There are 4 key decision areas in creating an environment and management regime to deliver 24 x 365 availability.

1. Physical location: In house or data centre?
A purpose built data centre is a more reliable and robust environment than in - house

2. How resilient is the hardware solution?
Ensuring no single point of failure, or minimising single point of failure through load balanced web servers, failover firewalls and clustered databases, will reduce downtime, but at a cost.

3. Comprehensive Monitoring: what to monitor?
Unless your Web site is being monitored you will not know that it is functioning effectively. Basic ping monitoring will not tell you whether or not your application is available. You need a comprehensive monitoring regime which includes end to end transaction monitoring to ensure that the site functionality is available at any time. The best time to develop those monitors is during the development of your application.

4. Support 24 x 365
When your monitors suggest a fault or possible fault occurring, you will need highly skilled and qualified resource to deal with the problem. The minimum number of support staff required to deliver a robust 24 x 365 support is 8. If you use an in - house or colocation hosting solution you will need to recruit and manage these 3 shifts of support engineers, or to have people on call at the end of a pager.

Source: HostShowcase.com

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