As more business in the publishing sector moves online, how to manage your site and your hosting needs becomes increasingly important to the success of the company. And yet, publishers obviously want to concentrate on their core business rather than become technology specialists. So what are the advantages of co-locating or a managed hosting service for your archive, subscriber details and catalogue?

Co-locating certainly has its advocates and it does offer an industrial grade option. However, setting up a co-located server is not an easy task and relies on the business already having an experienced IT team available, as it will usually include maintaining equipment, software and operating systems. It can be effective, but is very much a no frills service.

For many publishing businesses, co-locating only offers half a solution. It outsources the hosting but leaves the responsibility for maintaining and managing the technology with the publisher.

Virtualisation on the other hand, is a way to optimise the hardware that you have available and make sure that the resources that you have bought get used. Thereby making it a good value for money option. Moving your infrastructure into a private cloud that uses virtualisation means that you can reduce your infrastructure Capex and Opex, whilst still benefiting from the experience and technical expertise of an experienced managed hosting provider. This this therefore allows businesses to focus on delivering projects that make money rather than running services that generate no money.

One of our clients were faced with the problem of an aging IT infrastructure of 18 servers, which had had no investment since 2006, were performing poorly, had no redundancy or scalability and were limiting potential for business growth.  Budgetary estimates for necessary replacement were a minimum of £220K with operational costs of £86K PA. We advised and assisted designing a platform of a Hosted Hybrid Virtualised solution, which reduced initial capital costs to 2% and operational costs are now 61% PA of the original forecast. We were also able to provide a fully scalable, resilient system with completed disaster recovery. 

The fact that the service is virtual also makes it easier to burst & scale on demand scale; for example when resources need to increase, such as, the memory, hard drive, bandwidth or backup. Our CloudServers are pre-configured Virtual Private Servers, which sit on the NetBenefit Cloud platform and can be upgraded at any time as new VPSs can be built online.

With no geographic limitations on accessing the service, publishers have access to a high-quality and fast service, a necessity for any successful, high-traffic site. A managed hosting service can give publishers peace of mind that their online systems will function effectively and can be adapted to suit the varying needs of the business. Unlike co-location, managed hosting puts the technology in the hands of the specialists, leaving publishers to get on with running their core business.

Caroline Oliver, Business Solutions Consultant, NetBenefit

3 years committed to client care and satisfaction

This entry was posted on Monday, August 15th, 2011 at 6:56 am and is filed under managed hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.