Hosting Your Own Web Servers – The Pros And Cons For Businesses
You’d be hard pushed to find a good business these days that doesn’t have an online presence, even if it’s just a company blog or a poster site. With the increase in demand for sites hosted on the web, hosting companies have seen massive growth over the last 10 years. Having said this, there is a slowly increasing trend of companies cutting out the middle man and choosing to manage their servers themselves. Lets take a look at some of the positives and negatives of making this move.
Pro Control
Businesses are increasingly putting more emphasis on ‘control’ right now. They want more control of their money, more control of their staff and more control of their customers even. This control does seem to be working as many companies who run the tightest ships seem to be weathering the current financial storm the best. Moving your servers in house is an additional resource that you can keep more control of and react quicker to should something go wrong.
Con Support
When you pay a company for sever space, you aren’t just paying for the physical hardware. You pay also for the set-up costs, the maintenance costs and updating costs. Unless you have your own specialised team to carry out this work however, getting people in to carry out this work for you would cost more than the hosting companies charge in most instances.
Pro Cheaper
Even taking into account the above point, companies can actually make a real saving my managing their own data centers. Larger companies who already have their own technical team should be able to manage a server or two without too many problems and the cost of buying the sever outright will soon be made up by the monthly maintenance savings.
Con Outdating
When you buy a new server you may think its good for a few long years, but in reality new server technology hits the market almost everyday and you need to keep up. Whilst many hosting companies offer to update your servers as and when technological developments occur, if you manage your own you’ll have to pay for all of this yourself. There are a good few companies who offer cloud computing which is undoubtedly a more advanced option that few in-house severs can match up to.