It sounds like your motivation for outsourced hosting is sound--those are all good reasons for going outside. And you can go to more enterprise-level hosting that will give you better service guarantees than you have for your personal sites. It will cost more, but it will cost a lot less than hiring people. Simple web hosting is a commodity.
Some additional things to consider, though: you may also want to make sure your own connection to the internet is similarly (or better) guaranteed. Also, what internal services does the web server need access to, or impact? Like your collections DB, or member information. That will affect your bandwidth requirements and potentially change the way you get access to those data, since the security issues can be somewhat different over the Internet and you will be faced with questions of batched vs. live queries, etc. good luck, Matt On 1/10/07 12:28 PM, "Ari Davidow" <aridavidow at gmail.com> wrote: > 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 > _______________________________________________ > You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer > Network (http://www.mcn.edu) > > To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu > > To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: > http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l
