I have been at several organizations in the last few years, and one of the difficult questions has always been whether or not to host the website (which is increasingly a collection of specialized applications tied together by a common web interface) locally, or with an ISP.
My own prejudice is to host the organizational website externally. I want the website monitored 24x7, I wanted it backed up and cared for, and if we're successful and the website gets lots of traffic, I want to keep that away from the bandwidth I need to run my organization. I want that bandwidth overseen and tended to by folks who do it for hundreds of other websites a day. Same applies to security (not just from crackers, but including the basic expectation that data will remain accessible, unchanged; backups; denial of service attacks; etc. Most of all, I don't want to hire staff to ensure that all of this is possible--at my organization's size, we can't sustain an FTE for that purpose (especially when one considers that it would have to be at least two people sharing a beeper for reasonable 24x7 coverage). And I don't want part-time staff who are better and more focused on other things tending to this in their spare time. There is a downside. I have some personal websites hosted at an ISP that went down for several hours (out of control denial of service attacks) last year. It's true that I don't have the resources to deal with power outages, natural catastrophes, or denial of service attacks in my organization, but none of likely in my area. If my ISP goes out of service (or runs into trouble, resulting in reduced QoS for my site), I'm in trouble. So far, that has been less likely than losing local staff at inopportune moments or having bandwidth chewed up by a special, non-web-related project, but I don't know how representative my experience has been. I do know that at organizations where I've worked, some sizable, experiments in in-house hosting have led to finding a reliable external vendor relatively quickly. What is other people's experience? When might one want to host one's website onsite? Ari
