My preference is to leave it to the professionals. While I host my own
sites for the education, convenience and humbling learning
experiences,
Bragging rights, too. "Yeah, I've got a half dozen servers, redundant
T1s from two providers, all in my basement..." is today's equivalent of
the local tough in levis with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the
sleeve of his white t-shirt, talking about the 410 horses with <fill in
all sorts of gearhead car talk here> under the hood of his 57 chevy.
I don't generate my own electricity or purify my own
water; I leave that to professionals who understand how to engineer
facilities that deliver 99.9999% of the time.
Name one. :)
My T1 has been on 100% of the time since I got it four or five years
ago. The local power company, on the other hand, blips on us every 3 to
6 months with nary an excuse or logical reason.
I'd suggest you weigh
the benefits and risks of web and (especially) mail hosting and
determine how robust an engineering plant and guarantee you want to
provide. There are sites that provide hosted mail service and will
even let you private brand it (with a reasonable markup, of course)
and that would be my preference.
The trick is to find that place who really can deliver five 9s. I've
used two different hosting companies, big names, folks you would think
have figured it all out, and I've had entire days of being down. I'm a
little nervous of trying out yet another company....
I don't know about the big names, but we guarantee 99.999% uptime
to co-located customers and have delivered 100% since 2001.
Of course what 99.999% uptime means to a data center provider
and to you could be two different things.
To a data center provider it means the network connectivity to
and from the internet is always up and there will be no electrical
or other type outages. It does not mean that every server or
application running on a server in the facility will be up all the time.
Having said that, if I were providing email services as a business,
if the data center is up all the time, then the email services would
be up all the time.
I could see how some hosting providers could have a problem
because to keep things cheap they pack thousands of sites on
the same system, quite often with little to no redundancy.
Beyond all this, I think one of the things Ted maybe implied is
the assumption of risk. Does he want to assume the risk of
legal action if service failures cause business losses.
Jim Eddins
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