Hosting for Scalability

Once you have completed your requirements analysis, functional requirements, network architecture, application architecture, server architecture, and capacity planning, you may come to an unhappy conclusion. Your expectations for performance might exceed your ability to buy, configure, and maintain the necessary server farm. Luckily, you have another option: turn to a managed services company to host all or part of your portal.

Managed services offer compelling advantages for providing high-scale portal solutions. You can take advantage of the huge investments made by hosting companies in bandwidth, physical infrastructure, redundancy, disaster planning, maintenance, and monitoring of servers. Rather than make your own mistakes in buying and provisioning hardware, you can turn to someone who has already made and corrected their own mistakes.

The collapse of the dotcom era has left a trail of empty data centers around the country just looking for customers like you. As of this writing, it is a buyer's market in hosted services, and nearly every pricing offer you receive has room for negotiation. Hosting companies are an excellent reality check for your scalability plans. Working through the proposal process will help you better understand the needs of your data center and the real costs associated with it. You may find that the monthly subscription would be less than you would spend on services to maintain the infrastructure yourself, and you would be spared the capital investment in products that depreciate rapidly and become the building blocks for artificial reefs all too soon.

Best of all, if you have a problem with a hosted solution, there is someone else to blame and a service level agreement to force that someone to deal with the problem. All these factors point to outside hosting as a solution worth considering for many public or even enterprise portals.