Cloud Hosting vs Dedicated Hosting

You have many options when it comes to hosting for email, websites and application software. Let’s take a look at the tradeoffs to consider what's involved in making a good decision for your particular business situation.

You might think that the best solution is to do it yourself. This is how many, many companies got their start on the Internet and how larger companies still roll. At a minimum, you need a computer that acts as the file server plus a bandwidth connection. In-house that connection can be your LAN. If you want remote access, you’ll need a telecom line to get you to the Internet or as a private line connection.

An advantage of in-house hosting is that you have easy access to the equipment and complete control over what gets done to each server and when. Security is enhanced when everything is done over the LAN with no outside connections.

The downside of being able to do everything yourself is having to do everything yourself. You need to buy the equipment, build the environmentally controlled data center, provide physical security, do all installations, repairs and maintenance, and keep a constant vigil in case something goes awry. As you know, there are always things going awry.

This is the reason many companies consider buying their hosting rather than being in the hosting business themselves. You can start by simply outsourcing the data center itself. Companies that provide public data center facilities offer colocation services. You colocate or move into a provider’s facility. That facility provides the equipment racks and cages, redundant electrical power, environmental control, fire suppression, physical security and easy connectivity to telecom bandwidth services. You provide the servers and other appliances, which you install or contract for the colo facility personnel to install.

Some colocation companies have gone beyond just providing space and hookups. You can now rent servers and the labor to install and maintain them. You are still responsible for what’s running on the server other than the operating system, but you’ll have a tech staff available 24/7 to monitor your equipment and effect repairs if necessary.

It’s only a small step from renting equipment at a colocation center to renting a hosting service and not having to worry about the equipment at all. Small companies and home-based businesses may be able to get by with shared hosting, where you share a single physical server with many other clients. You have no access to the common operating system, but can upload files for your business. Shared hosting has become a commodity service and only costs a few dollars a month now. However, the performance of your site can vary depending on how heavily others are loading the server.

To regain control, you’ll probably want to rent a dedicated or private server. This is a physical server that only runs your files. Most of the time you'll gain root access to the machine, something that you never get with shared hosting. If you need even more capacity, you can upgrade to a larger server with more memory, CPU cores and disk storage.

Cloud hosting goes a step further. Cloud services are virtualized, often under the control of VMware. The cloud facility consists of rack after rack of physical servers and hard drives. They are connected to the outside word by multiple fiber optic bandwidth services. The idea is to have enough physical resources to handle any conceivable customer request. You don’t rent a particular server in the cloud. You rent a virtual server. It behaves just like a physical server, but may be one of many virtual servers running on the same machine. It is also possible that your one virtual server may span multiple physical servers.

Both dedicated hosting services and cloud hosting services allow you to rent rather than own the IT resources you need. You also save the expense and staffing required to operate this equipment around the clock. This is referred to as trading CAPEX (Capital Expense) for OPEX (Operating Expense), or rent vs buy.

The cloud goes one step further in virtualizing all physical resources. Many clouds are self-healing, such that if one piece of equipment fails another is automatically substituted. Cloud resources are also rapidly scalable. You typically have a web-based control panel that you use to provision (order) more or fewer resources. Extra servers can be added in minutes rather than days or longer. They can also be released when they are no longer needed so you aren’t paying for unneeded resources.

Are you suspicious that owning and running your own IT data center resources may be costing you more that you really need to be paying? You’re probably right. Which solution is the right one is a decision specific to your company. Get more information and pricing for cloud hosting vs dedicated hosting services to compare with what you are doing now.



Note: Photo of data center equipment courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Managed Hosting in Clouds and Colos

When it comes to hosting, you have all sorts of options. Most individuals and smaller companies opt for shared hosting. It provides decent performance at a rock bottom price. Once you get too big for shared Web hosting, you’ve got a decision to make. Do you do it yourself or opt for a managed solution?

There was a time when you needed the savvy to run your own web server to even get a site up and running. Now that Linux and Windows hosting has become so common and standardized, there are lots of places to get hosted. Even larger companies that insisted on maintaining control by buying their own servers and rack mounting them in their own temperature controlled data centers are taking a second look at colocation and clouds. Why? It’s mostly about cost but also about resources.

One of the big resource bottlenecks today is bandwidth. Certainly, carriers have kept up with offerings at GigE, 10 GigE, OC-768, wavelengths and dark fiber. What they haven’t done is provide universal access. While competitive fiber optic networks are expanding their service footprints every day, the majority of business locations still aren’t lit and aren’t likely to be in the near future. Ethernet over Copper bridges the gap for some. Speeds are up to 200 Mbps now. EoC is distance limited, however, so that your best chance for service is in a downtown business district.

Move to a colocation facility or cloud service, however, and your bandwidth issues may be over. They may not be if you need a high bandwidth pipe between your facility and the cloud. But if most of your bandwidth demand is coming from Internet users rather than in-house users, colos and clouds look pretty attractive. Cloud providers locate with the same facility at major carriers to ensure themselves of almost unlimited bandwidth. You can do the same thing by packing up your high bandwidth demand servers and shipping them to a colo facility. The best deals are where multiple carriers have established points of presence and are willing to bid for your business.

Another attraction of colocation is jettisoning the capital investment and operating costs associated with running your own data center. The colo has high security, backup power, environmental control and a tech support staff available 24/7. You need to provide the same things. Economy of scale favors the colocation company with its much larger facility and lots of customers to amortize the cost.

Smaller companies may find that they can’t afford an around the clock tech staff nor the investment required to build or expand an in-house data center. A move to a nearby colo center can get them the facilities they need for a monthly fee. But why stop there? Perhaps it makes even more economic sense to forget about having your own hardware at all. Why not pay as you go on everything?

This is the appeal of everything-as-a-service. Hedge your bets by renting rather than buying. You can do that at many colocation centers now. They’ll put a server in the rack for you and keep it maintained. It’s just like having your own hardware except that when you don’t need it anymore, you just walk away. Need a bigger server? Don’t buy one. Simply upgrade your colo service.

The cloud does the colo one better. The cloud philosophy is “why commit to any particular hardware at all?” Why, indeed? In the cloud all services are virtualized. You don’t need to know or care what they’ve mounted in the racks. What you are concerned about is how many instances of virtualized servers you need at the moment. If you find that your demands fluctuate, you can increase or decrease the number of servers or amount of storage almost instantly. The well of resources to tap is nearly unlimited.

The problem now is how to sort out the options. Shared hosting is nearly a commodity these days. Get competitive quotes for colocation and cloud hosting services for your IT operations and then compare with what it costs you to provide the same value in-house.

Advantage of Colocation Services

Businesses are often faced with make or buy decisions. Do you create a product or service in-house or go outside to a vendor who specializes in that field? The same question arises related to telephone and computer services. So, what’s the right answer?

Like most everything, technical services decisions are very specific to your particular situation at any given time. That’s why you should revisit these issues on a regular basis - say yearly. You know what the advantages are to buying and managing your telephone and computer systems in-house. What are the advantages to going outside?

I’m going to focus on a very specific set of services you can buy, called colocation. Colocation is not quite the same as going to the “cloud,” but there are some similarities. What colocation really means is moving your telephone and/or computing resources into another facility called a colocation center or carrier hotel.

As you might suspect, there are various degrees of colocation involvement. The one that generally comes to mind is packing up your data center equipment and shipping it to a colocation facility. Within this facility, you or the facility staff re-install your equipment in a locked caged area that is not accessible to other customers of the colocation center.

What’s the point of that? It’s an economy of scale in several areas. You’ll only save on real estate if you are pressed for space now or are paying a premium per square foot in a high rent building. But it’s not just the physical footprint that’s important. The “colo” center provides equipment racks, electrical power, cooling air and physical security. They have all the power you can possibly use and the HVAC equipment to carry away the heat from high performance servers and switches. They also have backup systems in place so that you don’t need to worry about power outages. That can be important if you are located in an area subject to storm outages or questionable power lines.

Many companies move to colocation centers simply for access to unlimited amounts of cheap bandwidth. Cheap is relative, but bandwidth costs per Mbps at colocation centers are probably better than you can get at your facility. There are multiple carriers located in the same building who establish points of presence for their fiber optic networks. Construction costs are minimal, if anything, because it’s just a matter of getting a drop from a carrier’s cage to yours. If you are in a location where you are bandwidth limited, with no fiber options or sky-high construction costs, simply relocating to a colocation center can solve the problem. You still communicate with your remote facilities using T1 lines or other available bandwidth.

In addition to facilities, colocation centers are staffed around the clock. This is a real boon to smaller companies that can’t afford a 24/7 tech staff. Even larger companies may benefit from having server experts literally a few feet away from their equipment at all times. You can maintain your own equipment, of course, or hire the center personnel to perform upgrades and patches.

You also have the option to rent equipment rather than supply your own at many colocation centers. Why come up with the capital expense for new servers every few years (or few months) when you can rent fully managed servers dedicated for your use only? This approach can also make sense for telephone equipment. Why have an expensive PBX phone system on your premises and the staff to keep it running, when you can use a remote PBX that an expert provider buys and maintains?

These questions are the heart of make-buy decisions. More and more, companies are finding it makes more sense to rent from a large facilities provider than maintain equivalent systems in-house. How about your business? Could you do better at a colo center? Find out by getting colocation services prices and availability that you can compare with your own costs to make an informed decision.