Quick and Easy Business Call - Or How I learned to Love Comm. Services

We're at a slightly interesting juncture. Some of our

hardware is 3-6 months away from the terminal phase of its existance.

I'm talking about you--servers, networking great and that old

standby--the first SAN. Normally, we'd start the purchasing process

about now--laying out specs and expected usage requirements for the

next 3 years, then following up with quotes from some of our favorite

(reliable) vendors.



But this time it's different.



Now, it's actually less expensive to outsource our entire hosting

operation--basically co-lo'ing VPS' from any of the number of

world-wide advanced hosting providers. 3 years ago, when we went

through out previous major purchasing cycle, we were stuck. To run the

systems that we needed, we were forced to purchase our own hardware,

purchase our own server licenses, pay to locate our equipment in a

Tier-1 facility, pay for bandwidth and maintain the hardware our selves

or pay an additional hardware support contract. Now, for 30% less than

our current co-lo bill, we can outsource our entire hosting operation

while still maintaining 100% control of the servers and the

applications (no sharing with anyone else). In addition, the bandwidth

available at that price is greater than what's being offered through

most co-lo's now PLUS the monthly bill includes automated backups (we

used to run them ourselves), 100% hardware maintenance, all server

licenses, 99.9999% uptime and increased SAN space.



So, for a 30% price drop, we can improve our reliability, improve

our operational procedures AND cut a huge chunk of our maintenance

budget? Ah, tell me again why the constant growth and the rapid

evolution fostered by the tech businesses is a bad thing.







--Shawn

Powered by ScribeFire.