The choice of hosting for your business’s products or applications is crucial. It determines how your infrastructure in the IT department scales and performs. Every business is different and hence so are their requirements. Some can make do with few resources allocated to them, others need terabytes upon terabytes of storage and enough processing power to blow your socks off (figuratively speaking).
There are a few different types of hosting facilities that companies offer. The main being:
- Colocation: This is when servers and networking hardware are owned by a firm but they are stored and controlled from a third party data center with the help of remote management or on-site management.
- In-House Hosting: All the servers and networking equipment is owned and facilitated in the company’s own facility.
- Managed Hosting: This is by far the most popular, dedicated servers and or cloud servers owned by the hosting company are leased out to clients.
Depending on your business size, these options can play a big role as to how your business performs online. Inadequate hosting choices can lead to slow websites, lost emails, downtime and many many more nerve-racking issues that you can definitely do without.
The majority of small to medium sized businesses will opt for Managed Hosting. The reason being, is that the servers are in proper facilities and maintained on a regular basis. Some even offer up-time guarantees! Brilliant.
With Managed Hosting, you won’t have to worry about technical up-keep and software for the most part as the hosting company manages all that for you. The only thing you have to focus on is making sure your website is done properly and is optimized. The more optimized your website is, the less resources it uses and the less resources you require! Saving you money in the long run.
In-House Hosting : This service is geared towards larger and more established businesses as they require quite a bit of funding to be set aside. Especially because you’re effectively building your own little data center on premises. The advantages of that are your data is always on-site, way more protection as you are in charge of how well protected your data is. Internal network for communications, faster transfer speeds internally and externally as well as all the resources you could possibly require are at your disposal (assuming you have that many).
Colocation: This service is a cross between the 2 above. And is for companies that have all the hardware that’s needed to operate their business and bring it online, but no facilities to do so. In Laments terms, it’s like renting a house for your servers, only it’s a proper facility. It’s a little more cost effective than running In-House Hosting and offers more protection as most third party data centers are huge with state of the art security and network infrastructure.
Usually when companies are just starting up they climb this process step by step, depending on how their needs grow. Starting from Managed Hosting, Then to Colocation and then finally, In-House Hosting.
No matter what your needs or budget are, there is a hosting solution out there to suit your needs.
If you have more questions on hosting, write to us at info@vmotionhost.com. We are happy to answer.