Understanding Colocation, Dedicated Hosting, Managed Hosting & Fully Outsourced Solutions

Any growing business has to eventually move to high end web hosting solutions like Colocation, Dedicated Web Hosting, Managed Hosting or Fully Outsourced solution. Let’s look at the advantages and disadvantages of each solution.

Colocation

In colocation your hosting provider provides you (rack) space to place your own servers and it comes with metered or unmetered bandwidth. You are responsible for purchasing and configuring the server to your requirements. This offers maximum flexibility in configuring your hardware and software. Conversely in some way it is also the hardest to configure or maintain. You definitely need a good system administrator. It is also normally the lowest priced of the hosting types discussed here. Your hosting provider is responsible for maintaining the networking layer and data center layer. You are responsible for the operating system, application infrastructure and business process software.

Dedicated Web Hosting

Dedicated web hosting can be managed or unmanaged. I am talking here about unmanaged dedicated web hosting. Here your web hosting provider will sell you a certain hardware configuration along with bandwidth for a fixed monthly price. Normally they will configure the server with your preferred choice of operating system and some essential software like Apache or MySQL. After the initial configuration, your are pretty much on your own. You will even have to (in most cases) configure your own firewall. This is pretty flexible in terms of configuration as you can pretty much do anything on your own server. You are on your own. Your web hosting provider is responsible only for the device layer, networking layer and data center layer. They may do a operating system reload for a fixed fee. The pain with web hosting providers is that they will charge you every month for items with fixed cost like networking card or harddisk. However a good dedicated web hosting provider will change your defective hardware components on a short notice.

Managed Web Hosting

I am explicitly talking here about managed dedicated web hosting. Normally they cost significantly higher than unmanaged dedicated web hosting. For example Rackspace few days ago gave me a quotation which is more than three times higher than a similar configuration from LayeredTech unmanaged dedicated web hosting offer.

In addition to device, layer, networking layer and data center layer, managed web hosting also covers your application infrastructure layer (JBoss, Java EE, ASP.net, SQL Server, MySQL etc. ) and operating system layer (Fedora Core, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Microsoft Windows etc.). As you go up in the spectrum of managed services you also potentially lose flexibility in selecting and changing your infrastructure. Think shared web hosting on steroids.

Service is key to both managed web hosting and fully outsourced services.

Full outsourced services

Fully outsourced service providers like IBM not only takes care of all of the above layers but also takes care of your Application layer and Business process layer. In short you lose much control over your system for the benefit of someone else taking care of it for you. If you make the right choice of service provider and have a good SLA agreement in place (ensure that there are sufficient penalty clauses in the agreement as vendors like IBM may not automatically add them) then you may be fine and can focus on your core competencies.

What to choose?
What you choose depends upon your unique needs, infrastructural requirements and monetary capabilities. Personally I prefer unmanaged dedicated servers with in-house dedicated system administrator to look after it.