We were recently talking to a company who wanted to host a Magento solution in their own small private data centre centre at their offices in London. They have a reasonably high traffic store running on their own proprietary e-commerce platform. They had decided that the time had come to shelve this and switch to Magento so they could reduce the cost of maintaining their own legacy system.
“Great”, we thought, but there was initially an insistence on hosting this on their existing data centre infrastructure. With the decision made to outsource the build of their new e-commerce site on an ‘off the shelf’ platform, it was slightly at odds with their need to maintain the IT side of their hosting as well.
They told us about the headaches they’d had in the past, and then proceeded to essentially talk themselves out of the proposition.
Power – keeping the room powered and cool – sounds easy doesn’t it. But it is harder than it sounds. You need redundant power, UPS units, diesel generators, de-humidifiers, fire suppression - the list goes on. They are an e-commerce business, not an IT company but the list of things they needed to do just to keep things running went on…
Maintenance – keeping the site available can also be easily taken for granted. What happens when the server falls over, because it will, early in the morning. Who gets called? Are their holiday’s covered? What if they are ill? Stuff like this happens, and exactly at the times you don’t want it to.
Resilience – with your own server or data centre, have you considered resilience? What happens if the facility becomes unavailable? Do you just go off the air?
Network – the server is just the start of it. What about the network to the outside world? Are their backups? Is there is reliance on a single provider?
Accountants – yes, your accountants have a part to play as well. They’ll be asking you why a server you decommissioned last year is still showing on their balance sheet. Do you even know the asset value of your own servers?
Scalability – can your set-up scale? Are you tied into a long contracts that makes scaling up your hardware difficult without taking on significant extra cost and commitment?
Upgrades – server hardware is typically out of date as soon as you buy it and you typically buy only what you afford, specification wise. So what about upgrades? How do you manage these? This potential customer had a history of upgrades that were both time consuming and costly.
…and even if you don’t have your own data centre and are just considering getting your own dedicated server somewhere, please consider the hidden costs. Outsourcing the task and receiving a fully managed service in return gives your business the opportunity to focus on the important things – selling and merchandising, not running a data centre!
And if the job is done correctly, you’ll get the same if not better levels of confidence that everything is being done according to industry best practice.
At On Tap we’ve thought about all these issues and evolved a hosting platform that answers these points. The latest iteration of this was launched at the beginning of 2010 and is already proving popular. Our MageCloud cloud hosting service provides Magento servers where the specification can be dynamically ‘flexed’ up and down according to your needs. Need to flex your server’s memory from 4MB to 16MB – just for a week? Need to add a couple more front-end web servers to cope with load during an advertising campaign? All this is straightforward with a service like MageCloud, and do you need this all in the next 24 hours? No problem. Try and do that with your own setup – it’s not impossible, but certainly tricky – and remember, that’s not why your in business, you’re an e-commerce store remember?
We’ve also introduced multiple hosting zones – two in the UK and another in the US, with failover options between zones – providing an extremely resilient solution. We’ve also segregated our network so that this resilience is based on no common potential points of failure.
And yes, we provide 24×7 support and we keep the server rooms powered and cooled.
And yes, like all other hosting providers, there are glitches from time to time. These are rare and relatively minor, but customers opting for our resilient solutions take these in their stride.
So don’t let the IT side of your e-commerce store drag your business down and cost you time and money. Outsource it, trust it and concentrate on your business. Let it flourish!
