Server Hosting | Dedicated Server | Data Centre

Can Server Hosting be done better in-house

By Denis Rowe | Published: August 27, 2010

This is the final entry in our series of Blog posts extracted from the Hosted Services White paper by Marina Beale, IT Services and Software Research Manager with IDC’s Services and Software Research Group.

As with other mature economies, Australia’s legacy infrastructure is now starting to inhibit growth opportunities. Data centres locally suffer from limited rack-space and cooling and power challenges resulting in escalating costs. Server consolidation is therefore expected to become a major trend for data centres, especially in medium and large organisations. Moreover, there are increasing demands being placed on IT to support the more strategic operations of the business, and to maintain better control of systems and resources. Read More »

What to look for in a Hosting Service Provider

By Denis Rowe | Published: August 17, 2010

Continuing our series of Blog posts extracted from the Hosted Services White paper by Marina Beale, IT Services and Software Research Manager with IDC’s Services and Software Research Group.

IDC’s Managed Services Survey, conducted in April 2010, identified the key objectives for organisations as: Read More »

Benefits of Infrastructure Hosting

By Denis Rowe | Published: August 12, 2010

Continuing our series of Blog posts extracted from the Hosted Services White paper by Marina Beale, IT Services and Software Research Manager with IDC’s Services and Software Research Group.

The benefits of infrastructure hosting can be grouped into three broad categories. These include:

Outsourcing and hosting, and how is this landscape changing?

By Denis Rowe | Published: August 9, 2010

Continuing our series of Blog posts extracted from the Hosted Services White paper by Marina Beale, IT Services and Software Research Manager with IDC’s Services and Software Research Group.

IDC considers Hosting, Managed Services, SaaS and cloud as parts of the outsourcing continuum. The differences between each are based on the level of ownership and management of the infrastructure, applications, contracts and delivery of service.

IT Infrastructure Services

By Denis Rowe | Published: August 6, 2010

This series of Blogs is extracted from the Hosted Services White paper by Marina Beale, IT Services and Software Research Manager with IDC’s Services and Software Research Group.

Hosting services have been around for a long time, however, as businesses continue to demand improved and simplified IT infrastructure that enables business strategy, there is an increased likelihood that the operational functions of IT departments are likely to be passed to third party providers. Given this business focus, the specific characteristics and trends that typify the Australian infrastructure landscape, and economic factors, there are plenty of advantages yet to be accrued from hosted services, particularly as we prepare for a long journey to the cloud.

Read More »

Managed Server Hosting – Speed, Security & Server Backup

By Denis Rowe | Published: August 3, 2010

This sixth blog posting in a series of nine describes some more aspects of managed hosting suppliers that may influence you when it comes to

choosing one over any others.

It is worth asking your managed hosting provider about the speed and type of interconnects used in their data centre. Where possible, fibre channel should be used, and at least fast, if not gigabit ethernet. Gigabit ethernet is increasingly common, but legacy centres may still be using 100Mbs interconnections.

IDC Whitepaper – Business Hosting for flexibility, scalability and reliability

By Denis Rowe | Published: July 30, 2010

Business growth is the ultimate business goal – but can bring with it burgeoning risks, especially for information and communications technology. By outsourcing the management of your dedicated server infrastructure and/or services, Business Hosting minimises each of these risks.

Business Hosting lifts the restrictions technology places on growth: providing instant scalability to cater for growth – whether long term expansion or short term peaks – while you focus on core business.

For an independent analysis of the benefits of hosting, compared to in-house management, download IDC’s “Hosting – Why and Who” whitepaper.

Managed Server Hosting – Physical setup options

By Denis Rowe | Published: July 27, 2010

This blog post looks at some of the different areas of a managed hosting provider’s topology, that is, the physical set up of networked devices that create the provider’s service offering. We divide the offering into three physical entities: front end environment, middleware and back end, or back office environment.
Read More »

Managed Server Hosting – The Data Centre Connection

By Denis Rowe | Published: July 23, 2010

We continue our series of posts on choosing a managed hosting provider. The next three posts examine the requirements for the data centre connection, physical setup of servers and performance and security issues.

The importance of a data centre’s internet connection, which is a factor that should be borne in mind when choosing a managed server hosting provider. Unless a provider can supply availability of over 99.97% they should be discarded in favour of a supplier who can. The internal resilience of systems in the data centre is irrelevant unless the data centre can serve its data to the internet.
Read More »

5 steps to ensure your website is secure

By Denis Rowe | Published: July 20, 2010

Anyone doing business on the web needs to be highly security conscious, both for their own data but also for data that belongs to their customers. There are many security threats, all of which need treating seriously. Threat levels are higher particularly if you are using a shared host as opposed to a dedicated server, where multiple sites use a single server or server instance. Because you are sharing a single system with other users, if one of their systems is compromised and root level access is granted to a third party, you are as at risk as the system that provided the way in to the system.
Read More »

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