Hosting Servers
When looking into managed hosting solutions, the monthly price should not be the deciding factor in making your decision. Too often, decisions on hosting services is made solely on price and crucial factors, like backup plans, uptime guarantees, access, and upgrade plans and policies are overlooked. These things are so integral to a hosting plan and usually not thought of until it is too late.
Selecting the dedicated server hosting plan that will meet your business needs must be treated as a cardinal business decision. Once a web server is up and running, you want to make sure you keep the down time to an absolute minimum, and things like maintenance, upgrades and OS switches will dramatically effect this. For instance, if you want or need to change your hosting servers operating system from Windows to Unix, you will effectively be setting up brand new servers. Such a switch is not simple, even though it is transparent to the end user. And, I think it is because of this transparency to the end user that it is perceived to be a “no big deal” to non technical folks.
When looking for hosting, I lean more toward colocation services because I get more flexibility with the plans and packages, and more importantly, because I own my own servers and just need a safe location with reliable power supply and connection to the internet pipe.