the outsourced hosting industry

introduction

Running an Internet host is difficult. Most people choose to make life easier by outsourcing hosting work. Many organizations offer hosting services.

insourced versus outsourced hosting

The supply of Internet services can be distributed. A supplier has a choice of running a service using his own host or using one provided by an enterprise. If the supplier runs his own services, the service hosting is insourced. If the supplier uses someone else's network, the service hosting is outsourced.

As long as the supplier has a host connected to the Internet, he can run an application that provides an Internet service. The supplier is responsible for all parts of the system, from power network to dealing with customers.

Many business enterprises provide data centers for hosting Internet services. The supplier can pay an enterprise rent for running his service in their center. The supplier splits responsibility for running the service with the enterprise. For instance, the enterprise promises to keep the host running, but don't care about keeping the Internet service running. The supplier keeps the service running and deals with customers.

Most SMEs cannot run their own Internet services. They must pay an outsourcing company to take responsibility for some or all of these things.

tactical versus strategic hosting

• tactical - A service is hosted externally. The supplier still runs a data center. The market for web service hosting has been around for decades and is mature.
• strategic - All services are hosted externally, perhaps using a cloud. The service supplier treats the hosting enterprise as a long-term partner. Data center outsourcing is a new market and is immature.

companies that offer outsourced hosting

• Rackspace
• Fasthosts
• Every ISP
• Amazon
• Bytemark

outsourced hosting challenges

A service owner wants assurance that their service will be looked after properly. He looks for a hosting supplier with these strengths.

• capacity - there is plenty of bandwidth, disk space and CPU to go round.
• complexity - if the service grows, the hoster can offer more.
• expertise - the hosting administrators are skilled in their jobs
• reliability - the service will run 24 hours a day.
• responsiveness - if something goes wrong, the hoster will deal with the problem immediately.
• security - the service is protected against loss and damage.

Running Internet services is an expensive and time consuming business. The hoster offers to manage all of these things. The more they take on, the bigger the price tag - 99.999% reliability is more expensive than 95% reliability.

infrastructure hosting stack

A stack of hardware and software makes up the infrastructure that provides the hosts. Hosters are pretty flexible and will manage as much or as little of this infrastructure stack as a customer is willing to pay for. A customer may want to outsource a simple web service or they may want to outsource their entire data center.

A customer may own an infrastructure stack, but wants an external supplier to run it. Companies often outsource some work around their hardware and software, because it is cheaper than trying to deal with every technology area in-house.

hosting control

• self-managed. A customer rents computers from an outsourcing company and does not have to deal with any hardware or networking. If the computers are virtual machines, the customer can elf-provision more computers. This is a cheap way of running a data center.
• lightly managed. A customer rents computers from an outsourcing company. The company maintains hardware, networks and operating system. They patch the OS and keep it secure.
• complex managed. Customers supply content, special configuration or customised applications. The company maintains everything else - hardware, networks, operating system and off-the-shelf applications. Traditional shared web hosting is in this category.