Hosting: Internal vs. External

Pros & Cons of Internal/External Hosting Solutions

[KonaFan]

Hi Group!

The company I work for is trying to decide whether or not to bring all the development--hosting included in house. I have been brought on as web lead, and hope to sway the powers that be towards a dedicated hosting solution.

Background: We are a small trade publisher (under 100 employees) and put out 7 zines total. Current site is hosted and maintained by an outside consultant on NT box running IIS 4 and site is ASP driven.

I am looking to migrate it over to Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL. My experience with internally hosted sites is they almost always have serious downtime issues.

Hoping some of you can throw out some Pros for going with a dedicated provider (Rackspace for example) versus Cons for doing it ourselves. Looking for input regarding maintenance, security, reliability, total cost of ownership, etc.

Thanks!

Kona Fan

[killroy]

I moved internal, and have the lowest downtime rates of any host in the country ;) But I'm just a one-guy setup and know what I'm doing. With larger systems, it would probably end up more expensive as you need redundant power, backup, replacement parts, tech people and a whole IT team inhouse.

SN

[rmplmn]

Here's a couple pros for external hosting:
- Security - It is better to have a service that is dedicated to monitoring the system and maintaining patches. Security is the biggest liability (IMHO) for a web site, especially one that gathers personal and/or financial information.
- Maintenance - No beeper/text messages on at 2:00 am on a Sunday morning notifying you that the server is down. - Con - It's called 24/7/365 tech support or else those calls will go to the CEO.

Just make sure that you do not rely on your service for development. If you ensure that they have all of the tools your web site will require for the next five years and develop your solutions in-house, I think you'll do well. However, if your "consultant" does the development, in part or in whole, you are going to be banging your head against the wall every time you want to make a significant change.