The recent Amazon outage has raised many questions about hosting needs and how businesses would like their providers to respond when something goes wrong. It’s still unclear exactly what caused the initial power failure at the Amazon data centre in Dublin and why the back-up generators failed to come online. However, recent outages and breaches of security have shown that, even a relatively minor, or short-lived event can have revenue and reputational damage for a business. So, how do these companies want their hosting providers to respond when an outage occurs?

Obviously, getting back online is a key, but a critical point in the process is the communication with clients. It’s tempting in this economic climate to take the cheapest option when outsourcing the businesses hosting requirements, but this may have an impact on the subsequent levels of service. Businesses might find they prefer to have someone they can call when an outage occurs and get an immediate response. In fact, what you need from a support perspective should be something to consider when choosing a hosting provider. Large corporates with in-house IT teams may feel they don’t need to much communication, whereas SMEs, or companies for whom an online presence is vital, may demand concise regular updates even if the situation is beyond the hosting provider’s control, or more specialist advice and counsel from their provider.

It’s often only when things go wrong that you find out how good your suppliers are, and exactly what your business will tolerate in terms of outage. This is where specialist organisations can often be more effective, by providing managed services, with real people chasing up answers to the problem and keeping in touch. Not all businesses will need this level of service, but some preparation and consideration of the issues that an outage might throw up, could help to avoid problems in the long run.

Tom Moores, Solutions Consultant, NetBenefit

http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/tom-moores/7/380/5b3

Tags: hosting provider, managed services, outage

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 18th, 2011 at 9:27 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.