Should Your Business be Using Enterprise Hosting?

Your company has reached new levels in your online business and you have frankly outgrown your current hosting package. With all the new technology and the expansion of your company’s website, you are looking to find an enterprise hosting provider. This article will take you through some of the factors you need to take into account when considering moving to enterprise hosting.

 

Enterprise Hosting – What are the Advantages?

Almost all business websites start off using shared hosting. But as a company’s online presence develops and grows, their bandwidth or ecommerce software requirements will cause “growing pains”: erratic website functions, or server crashes due to overloads in traffic. The benefits of an enterprise hosting account are simple:

• Continuous Availability – almost all enterprise packages have some form of “uptime” contract in which they offer high availability, performance or remediation services. They also offer priority repair services on manage hosting accounts.
• Optimal Routing – You can either purchase your own hardware and software to create a competitive edge in accessing the Web or you can lease pre-configured equipment from the host to meet your requirements. You will also configure load balancing for peak traffic flows.
• Increased Security – By using enterprise hosting, your business can more easily take the steps necessary to add all the extra layers of protection you could want between your sensitive client or customer data and those roaming rogues on the Internet.

The “Big” Leap – Large Shared Account vs. Dedicated Server vs. Managed Cluster?

In instances like this, the owners of the company along with their IT staff or their web services company, should sit down and take a good look at their situation. They need to evaluate both the current technological resources of their current host along with their planned future growth.

At this point, you have basically two choices: move to a larger or bigger shared hosting account (fewer websites on each machine, along with some better management features) or make the move to a dedicated server (which is client managed, so you maintain complete control) or into a managed hosting cluster (where your leased server is maintained by the enterprise hosting company).

Many companies (if constrained by budgetary concerns) simply expand into a larger shared account, which stops the problem of training IT staff or hiring additional technical support. However, if your current hosting company utilizes its own datacenter, than more than likely they can offer you an enterprise package that includes leased or dedicated servers.

Using a dedicated server can be a fatal step if your IT staff or webmaster is improperly trained to handle the extra stress of installing, connecting, monitoring and maintaining all the functions of your web server. Plus, you must also take into account the capital expenditures of purchasing all the servers along with all the accessory hardware and software that must go with it.

Still others needing more bang for their buck, transfer their online business into managed clusters where the enterprise hosting provider has the problem and expense of provisioning, installation, monitoring, maintaining and repairing all leased equipment in the cluster it owns.

Now that you know which factors play an important role in enterprise hosting, you will be able to make a better and informed decision.