February 26th, 2008

If your company has a big server room, you may have opted to put your web site on one of those servers. It may have been a matter of convenience, a perceived cost savings, or pressure applied by your network management staff, but there are many reasons you should get them out of the building and over to a professional management company as soon as possible.

1 – Power Outages. Your servers have a power backup, but those only run a short time before they run low and shut the system down. There are many places, even in big cities, where the power will fail at some point almost every year. If the power is out for hours or days, your site is gone too, and it may not come back online until someone physically reboots the system. You could be offline for days due to power outage, and in business, that can be a critical difference.

2 – 24/7 Management. Whether it’s a power outage or something else, if your site is managed onsite, you need to have someone standing by in case of big or small hiccups. Having your site professionally hosted at another location means it will always be overseen, and that things like daily backups and security patches will be taken care of whether you’re paying attention or not. The peace of mind is invaluable, and exceptionally affordable.

3 – Cost. While we’re on the subject, the cost of moving your site to a professional, off-site host will often be less than keeping it in-house. For a fixed monthly cost you can stop worrying about needing to buy hardware and pay for bandwidth. Those two costs alone can eat you alive if you’re getting any traffic or using older machines. Server software alone often costs as much as the entire hosting package. When you get down to uncommon dollars and common sense, it usually saves companies money to move the servers off-site.

4 – Intranet security. If your web server is in the same place as your internal network, the possibility exists, however remote, that a savvy hacker will get through your site and into your wealth of “secure” internal documents. There is no business that can afford a breach of security on this order, however slim the possibility.

5 – Virus infections. Serious infections may come in through any number of directions. It can come in through your web site’s FTP, from your employees downloading attachments, web browsing from workstations or any number of other ways. If this happens, and it does all too often, your internal network and web site can be taken over and data can be destroyed or compromised.

6 – Speed. Bandwidth is expensive and keeping a fat pipe to send data to your customers can be difficult. If your site is hosted by a professional company you can make sure you never run out of bandwidth, the site never slows down, and that the inherent network speed is as high as possible by keeping it as close as possible to major backbone.

If you’re really committed to keeping your web server at your location, consider talking with your IT staff an your web designers. Look at the benefits and think about what’s really most important. It very rarely makes sense for any but the largest web companies to manage their own web servers, but asking the right questions will make the answers more evident based on your specific needs.

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