Webhosting: The NetConstruct Way

28/04/2020
2 min read

As a recognised Kentico Hosting Partner, our clients often ask us how and where they should host their website. To be honest, there’s more than one correct answer. With so many factors to consider – performance, location, security and cost, to name a few – it’s essential to take the time and discuss the options. 

The common debate  

One of the most common debates is in-house vs. public Cloud vs. private Cloud. Cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS have grown exponentially in the past five years, hitting the desirable spot between cost and performance. They may be affordable for a self-hosting business, but are they always the best option?  

When you consider backups, security policies and 24-hour support, we’re not convinced Cloud is always best. There are many situations where in-house hosting is the better option, such as: 

  • Where you have a stable workload that is consistent every hour of the day and can reserve demand upfront. A managed service provider provides a lower unit cost than Cloud providers who charge on a pay-as-you-use pricing. As their model is all about flexibility, they may charge a higher unit price.  
  • If you have a large transit of data from the Cloud back to other systems in your on-premise data centres. There are network costs to take data out of the Cloud and, if this is done on a large and frequent basis, an in-house solution would be more cost-efficient. 
  • If your business lacks the in-house skills to develop fully automated deployment patterns for your applications that horizontally scale and leverage the elasticity of the Cloud. Not all applications have the ability to be horizontally scaled in their current state. As such, they cannot expand when there are peaks in users consuming the platform. 

How we can help you  

We’ve been a partner to Rackspace, one of the largest International hosting providers, for 15 years. From our experience, we’ve formalised the many hosting variations into six key packages. These range from a simple, multi-tenant platform through to a dedicated, fully load-balanced web farm with MSSQL cluster, DDoS mitigation and global CDN. But we can always change these packages to match your requirements.  

Hosting over 200 websites on behalf of our clients, we’re able to offer huge economies of scale. Our focus is on recommending the best package, not the most expensive. When selecting a package, it’s important to consider not only hardware costs, but also licensing. Most enterprise-level content management systems come equipped with a license cost per server. Straight away, we’ll want to know about traffic levels and customer behaviour to make sure you’re not wasting money on equipment you don’t really need. 

 Where do you go from here?  

We’re not saying you definitely shouldn’t go with an in-house solution, or to avoid the public Cloud at all costs. We’re simply saying let an expert help you make the decision of what is right for your business. Rackspace once shared an interesting mantra which we keep at the forefront of our hosting discussions – “Cloud is for everyone, not for everything”.  

Get in touch if you would like to discuss your hosting requirements and to find the right solution for your business. 

Thoughts. Opinions. Views. Advice.

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