This trend of outsourcing web hosting has changed with the economic downturn. To save money, companies now prefer to host their websites in-house. Here are some issues to bear in mind when making a final decision on in-sourcing the company website.
Initial investment: A heavy expense is involved in setting up a tiered website with cascaded firewalls, load balancers, multiple web and application servers, database clusters, raid arrays and so on to handle multiple concurrent connections. A website can have multiple tiers of pages, applications and database servers serving dynamic content. Moving the website in-house would mean spending on dedicated staff to maintain the site and servers.
Personnel: Hiring a dedicated skilled in-house workforce for the external website means constantly training them and paying them competitive salaries to ensure retention. Hiring contractors or consultants could be an option, though it is not economical.
Server and Network Security: Servers hosted on the Internet adhere to a totally different security policy. Even if a layer of firewalls protects the site, host and application level security cannot be neglected. You need dedicated professionals whose sole responsibility is to maintain security for all servers exposed to the Internet. Such professionals need to keep themselves current with the hacking trends, software updates, CERT advisories, intrusion detection software etc.
Monitoring and event management: A website that serves traffic to the Internet needs to be monitored 24x7, which implies the need for good monitoring tools that can see your site from all aspects: performance, security, broken links, predictions etc. Tivoli from IBM or Unicenter from CA are famous monitoring tools. BMC Software's Patrol can go a level deeper to provide data that can be archived and used for growth predictions.
Data backups/archiving: It is always wise to take regular backups of your entire site, whether for disaster recovery or because your business dictates it. Taking backups is not an easy task; it can be a business within its own. Deciding on a data backup solution could be an expensive and challenging exercise. Tape technologies are cheap and old; new data storage technologies like SAN and NDMP etc are better for backing up several gigabytes of data, though they are expensive.
Disaster recovery and business continuance: If your site needs to be up 365 days a year, disaster recovery or business continuance solutions are a must. These solutions can range anywhere from simple local recovery solution to a remote site that keeps data in sync should a local site ever go down. Such solutions usually come with a heavy price tag. EMC, a leading storage vendor, charges from $150,000 to $200,000 upfront for SRDF (software to keep data between two remote sites in sync). This excludes the investment in the storage component itself, which can be anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million.
Physical infrastructure and access to servers: Hosting a full-fledged website requires a full-scale infrastructure to support it. Servers require a considerable investment in power and air-conditioning, as machines consume huge amounts of power and generate a good amount of heat. Power and network cabling of servers in a datacenter-like fashion can result in a high initial investment. To prevent site crashes, you also need to ensure enough redundancy is built in—like redundant power and battery backup. This can add a significant amount to the electricity bills and maintenance contracts.
Pipe to the Internet: If the company website is bought in-house, additional bandwidth may need to be allocated for email, DNS and the Internet-surfing that employees do. Based on how much traffic your site serves, this could end up driving your Internet connection bills through the roof. Bandwidth is getting cheaper by the day, but it is still not free.
Vendor contracts: Maintaining a website means requiring all hardware and software vendors to back you up in servicing broken equipment or patching software or applications. For that, vendor contracts need to be in place. Vendor contracts are not cheap, and having those can drive your budget crazy.
Cost of ownership: When it comes to housing equipment, serious consideration needs to be given to whether equipment needs to be bought outright or leased. Technology antiquates very soon, so make sure you invest money in equipment that will last you for some time to come. Consider alternate options such as leasing or renting equipment, so that it can be exchanged when the technology becomes obsolete.
