Since the pandemic, many companies have changed the landscape of their business to become more digital. As a result of this businesses started building or updating their own sites. This has led them to look at their hosting solution.
Deciding how to host your site can be a complex decision. This article will outline why choosing a hosting provider could be a better option for your business and the dangers of hosting in-house.
The dangers of hosting in house
If you’re hosting yourself the first thing you will need is hardware. This is often the biggest downfall as without the correct hardware that has the capabilities to handle the hosting there will most likely be regular technical issues.
This hardware can be expensive and you will need to have multiple replacement parts on-site to be able to fix/replace any components on the set-up.
Even with the correct hardware, this will need constant maintenance and monitoring to ensure your set-up is running efficiently. This can be massively time-consuming for an individual certainly if your business has a small team.
As part of this maintenance, this will require checking for software updates, installing anti-virus software, ensuring your cyber security measures are up to date and checking your hardware. This again is very time-consuming but without it, your set-up will most likely fail.
A server needs to be running 24/7 which with the recent rises in energy prices is going to increase your electricity bill significantly. Running a server 24/7 will also produce a substantial amount of heat. If a server is not kept at the optimum temperature it can run a risk of overheating which can result in the server shutting down. so you need to also run a cooling system to keep the server running efficiently.
A server needs round-the-clock monitoring meaning that if your server goes offline in the middle of the night you will either need to be on hand to fix this immediately or risk losing potential business hours.
The combination of all these factors means that hosting your own server can be very expensive, time-consuming and ultimately impractical, which is why it is smarter to use a hosting provider.
Example
An example of when hosting in-house created issues was when Facebook had outages in 2021.
This outage was a result of router changes in house causing disruptions to their data centres’ network traffic ultimately resulting in a massive outage.
Here is a quote from Facebook about the outage:
“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.” (Source)
This shows that even for large companies like Facebook hosting with a provider rather than in house should help to reduce the chances of outages like this.
How we can help
At Datacentreplus we aim to provide hosting solutions that give you peace of mind. We offer fully managed hosting meaning our team of highly trained engineers. They will be on hand 24/7/365 to support you with any issues that may arise.
We only use server-grade hardware in our own data centre to ensure the best performance for you. In the event of any hardware failures, we have spare parts on-site to ensure the issue is resolved efficiently and seamlessly.
We keep our data centre at the optimum performance temperature using 3 powerful Airedale coolers. This ensures the data hall is kept at a consistent temperature providing resiliency against a unit failing. We also have extensive environmental monitoring in place. This will detect excessive humidity, moisture or water ingress at key points of the building.
Our support team is contactable either by our ticketing system, email, phone or web chat.
If you would like to find out more about how our services can help your business or just simply more about what we do call us on 0161 464 6101 or email us at hello@datacentreplus.co.uk.
Alternatively, you can head to our website to find out more.
