Building Better Web Sites » Web Hosting

Do you lose pre-paid domain money when you change hosts?

john — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 03:23:53 +0000

I got this email inquiry from a potential customer yesterday:

Comments: I recently started a website with (deleted name of host) which is a do-it-yourself web hosting site. After a week or so, I think I’m about ready to throw in the towel! The problem is that I’ve paid for my domain for the next 4 years!! Can you all build my site through the existing host so I don’t lose my money? I want a great website at an affordable cost (I’m sure you’ve never heard that before!)

I work in the area and could stop by your office at some point. My website is (deleted)

Thanks,

(name deleted)

See my reply after the jump.

The Short Answer:
No, you will not lose the years that are pre-paid on your domain names.

The Long Answer:
When you purchase a domain name, you buy it from a registrar. Registrars don’t (can’t) force you to use their hosting company. If you are the person that owns that domain name, you can point it at ANY hosting company for as long as you own it. Each domain name has a pair of information entries for the name servers that are associated with your domain name. Remember that and say it with me “NAME SERVERS”. Those two name server addresses serve as the “zip code” for your domain, and it points the domain name that you own to some host on the web. Since you are the owner of your domain name, you can login to your domain registrar (godaddy, network solutions, tucows, etc.) and change those name server entries. Once you do that, all email and web hosting traffic will then be pointed at your new host. Make sure that you choose a host first, setup an account with the host, setup email accounts, and then move the domain name last so that you don’t have downtime.

Now, since you are worried about losing $40 or so on your domain names, and you want something “great at an affordable cost”, we should probably meet or have a phone conversation to discuss what an “affordable cost” and what “great” is.

New Delaware.Net Hosted Applications Launching!

john — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 17:45:47 +0000

2007 is our best year ever for R&D
In late 2006 and into 2007, I hired a bunch of new talent for Delaware.Net, and we also improved our internal web development process greatly. This was due to customer demand for more responsiveness from us, and I am happy to say that we achieved this goal. The new team and our business plan is literally transforming our company and taking us to a whole new level.

Our new slogan for the company is “World-Class Web Works”, and this has several meanings for us. It defines our goal – to build and host “world-class” solutions for our customers, and to give them the best support around. It also defines our advantage – the fact that our world-class solutions make customer’s web sites work better for them. Even though we are miles ahead of local competitors, we are committed to constantly improving our services across the board. To that end, I am happy to share with you some of the milestones we have reached already in 2007, as well as a sneak peek at our TENTH anniversary announcements that are coming in October.
Our New Hosting Framework – Team-Logic 2.0
We’ve built a Software As A Service (SAAS) web application suite that allows us to launch and manage ALL of our web applications more quickly. We call this new system Team-Logic 2.0. We’ve looked at “foundation Intranets” and hosting panels offered by other web design and hosting companies, and I have to say that our new framework blows away what these other firms can offer.

Our new Team-Logic system combines roughly 30 of our hosted applications into ONE new interface. By creating a new security system for all of our applications, customers can now log into ONE interface to control their web site, handle their marketing needs, and track sales.

This is a MAJOR deal because we can build dynamic web sites faster than other companies, and these applications are easier to manage and improve. Turn-key applications running on Team-Logic 2.0 include; custom web sites, blogs, content management applications, eCommerce storefronts, real estate MLS systems, Intranets, mailing lists, and much, much more. We completed this new framework back in July, and deployment of the system is underway now for some large clients. The new system works for all clients large and small, and it offers a significant performance boost over previous versions of our applications when they were separate. We’ve also invested in new hardware for this system, which will run much faster than the virtual servers that other companies use. As you can imagine, it has taken over a year of planning to build this new framework, and now that it is complete we will be able to offer an incredible amount of value for web site hosting customers that they will not be able to find anywhere else.

New Email Marketing Newsletter Server – Mail-Logic
Our newest on-demand application is called Mail-Logic. Mail-Logic is a complete re-build of our email newsletter application, and it is now complete and undergoing testing for a large client. Mail-Logic makes it possible to send out your newsletters, special flyers, and more to a very large audience easily. Mail-Logic will be sold as an on-demand product that can be used within minutes for any client that we host. Existing Delaware.Net newsletter clients will get a free upgrade to Mail-Logic. The feature list for Mail-Logic is very long, and there will be a new web site for it soon. We have designed Mail-Logic to compete with Constant Contact and other email marketing vendors. Mail-Logic can be used as a standalone solution, or it can be used within ANY existing web site. Pricing will be very competitive with national solutions. Mail-Logic is built as a module that runs on our Team-Logic framework, which means that it takes only minutes to deploy the newsletter server for new clients.

New eCommerce Engine – Store-Logic 2.0
Our Store-Logic engine is undergoing a complete upgrade. The store administrator will work as a module under our new Team-Logic 2.0 framework, allowing us to deploy eCommerce store with new features quickly. Store customers will enjoy new data migration features, as well as enhanced UPS shipping, AJAX, XML, and other features. The new eCommerce administrator is much faster than before, and busy stores will be able to manage their stores more easily due to the AJAX technology. Since our CRM, eCommerce, and Mail-Logic programs all run under the same framework, we can custom-tailor an eCommerce solution that includes email marketing and sales tools for any size company.

More!
There is much more coming that we will release information on soon.

Google Buys Postini for $625M in Cash

john — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 16:46:32 +0000

Google just announced that they are going to buy Postini, a spam and virus-filtering company for over $600 million USD.

Delaware.Net uses/offers Postini services as a reseller, and the price is right – $1 per user. Postini catches almost all spam and viruses before they reach your inbox. This saves hosting companies time and money and allows users to gain access to the control panel that is doing the filtering, so that you can see the spam that is sitting in the quarantine on Postini’s servers.

It will be interesting to see if privacy advocates get up in arms about this or not. Postini routes the email of 5,000,000 users.

Press release sent to me from Postini:

Google has announced their plans to acquire Postini.

This is great news for Postini customers. Postini has always had aggressive plans for the future. We have excellent solutions and a loyal and strong customer and partner base, thanks to you. The opportunity to become part of Google will allow us to accelerate our growth and leverage the scale and resources of this great company.

What does this mean to you? It will be business as usual at Postini. We will continue developing new solutions in compliance and enhancing our core communications security services. We will continue to support you and honor all contracts. You will receive the same quality, value, and service from Postini that you have come to expect.

Postini and Google are an excellent match. Google is interested in Postini as part of their strategy to deliver compelling hosted applications to business of all sizes. As you know we already have a partnership in this area. The Postini product line for secure messaging infrastructure and providing compliance solutions are very complementary to Google Apps including Gmail, Calendar, Talk, Docs & Spreadsheets. Google already has 100,000 customers for these services today. Together Postini and Google will become the next-generation Software as a Service (SaaS) company.

Please visit the Postini Community Forum, and stay tuned for more updates through our website, email, and other vehicles.

The acquisition is expected to close by the end of third quarter 2007. Until then, we will continue to operate as an independent company and it is “business as usual”. Please watch your email for an invitation to a special webinar for customers and partners.

Click here for additional information.

Regards,

Quentin Gallivan
President and Chief Executive Officer
Postini, Inc.

More Info:

Release on the Postini web site
Marketwatch

Forbes Magazine post

Local Marketing – Should you help non-profits?

john — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 19:58:20 +0000

I participate on an email mailing list where other Internet company owners discuss local and national marketing strategies. Sometimes there are great ideas, sometimes not so much. Recently there was a post from someone in the industry about how a good local marketing strategy should contain marketing to not-for-profits and other good-natured word of mouth efforts locally that can help your reputation.

I used to believe that, but what I found is that they really don’t work all that well.

I am CONSTANTLY called (weekly, and sometimes almost daily) to sponsor a golf tournament, a luncheon, a baseball team, and on and on. If I did ALL of them I would probably go broke. I’ve done those long enough that now I can honestly say that they rarely (if ever) turn into tangible sales. They do help our local image, and it does get our name recognition out there, but that again is hard to quantify into actual sales.

Do I sponsor events knowing that I will never get a return? Absolutely. Especially when the person or organization asking me for a sponsorship handout is one of my better customers. To this day we still donate over $50,000 per year in services to many organizations. Even when a service is given away for free, there are still phone calls for support, guidance, etc. So that number may actually even be higher.
But there are MANY easy things that you can do to market locally inexpensively, even if you are not an Internet company.
With that in mind, I started to draft a response to the email list so that I could provide some alternative methods for marketing locally that REALLY add value directly to the bottom line.

Here are some that are off the top of my head. I could probably come up with 50 easy.

1. Offer free trials for services/applications

2. Make it easier to switch to you, or sign up with you

3. Offer service bundles that tie in trials on more expensive services

4. Try BNI (www.bni.com) or other marketing lunch groups

5. Create a NO-RISK, time limited offer (ie “no setup until August 1st”)

6. Attend chamber of commerce mixers (we are doing two of them tonight, actually)

7. Make generic business cards for your company that don’t have a person’s name on them. Put those at car washes and bulletin boards at the Gym and the YMCA.

8. Create another business card that has a cash value towards your services. Hand it to a prospect you meet that is sitting on the fence.

9. Create a blog and have your staff post helpful articles to it (we are only just now getting around to doing one company-wide – http://blog.delaware.net/)

10. Market to your own customer databases with email newsletters

11. Use analytics to find golden pages in your sites.

12. Cross-market services from within your applications and pages.

13. Embrace HTML email instead of fighting it – make nice email signatures for your staff that have links and graphics in them.

14. Put an article on your web site explaining how to move a site to you (http://www.delaware.net/support/gettingstarted.cfm)

15. Integrate asking for referrals from your customers into your process somehow (lots of gold here)

16. Use press release web site and local newspaper forums for press releases

17. Randomly follow-up with existing customers for feedback (asking for feedback usually exposes other problems that your customer has that you can help them solve.

18. Write articles for local newspapers

Have more local marketing ideas? Reply to this post and I will publish them!

Verizon Backbone Problems Affect Internet Traffic Today

john — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 20:28:40 +0000

Verizon had some serious network issues today, and it appears that interconnects from Cogent and other backbone providers also suffered today. When the latency was happening, major sections of the graph below were yellow and orange.

Now that the latency has subsided, you can see that it is centralized on Verizon. We got reports from one of our customers today that uses Verizon DSL that they were having a major outage. This doesn’t affect Delaware.Net, this is just for reference.

Click Here to view the network graph

How to Register the Perfect Domain Name

john — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 02:38:52 +0000

Choosing your domain name for your business is a very important decision, and it is the first step towards your online precense. Once you start to advertise your domain name, your customers will bookmark it. You can and should use the same domain name for both your web site AND your work email. Domain-based email addresses are one of the reasons why most people first register their domain names. Even before you are ready to build a web site, you can begin to use your domain name for email right away. This makes you look way more professional than using the free email address that is given to you by your Internet access provider. Also, if you change ISPs, your will still be able to use your own domain-based email addresses, no matter who your ISP is.

Searching for Available Domain Names

There are many places on the web where you can search domain names to see what is available, and who owns the domain names that are already taken. A domain name search is called a “whois lookup”. We have a whois lookup form here. You can also find an easy to use lookup at http://www.internic.org.

How to Choose a Domain Name

As long as the web has been around, one of the most difficult and personal decisions a company must make is choosing their Internet domain name. Good, unique domain names are hard to find sometimes, especially those that end in â€œ.comâ€. You may find that the “nameofyourcompany.com” is already taken by someone else, and this can be a stressful realization.

What to do when the domain name you want is already taken

Explore buying it from a squatter â€“ This isnâ€™t the most attractive option, but if you really have your heart set on a domain name that is already taken, then you might be able to purchase it from the current owner. If the domain name you want is taken, then look to see if there is a web site on it. Many individuals still to this day speculate on domain names (known as squatters), and they purchase them hoping to make a profit. When there is no web site on a domain name, or when there is a simple under construction page on the site, then it may be for sale. When you do the whois on the domain name, look to see who owns it, and how they list their contact information. Sometimes it is obvious that the domain name was registered by a speculator because the name of the company that owns the domain name is listed as something like “Domain For Sale”. Beware that no two domain name squatters are the same. Some will ask for $200 for a domain name and others will want $20,000 or more. If the domain name squatter is unreasonable, then move on and don’t waste your time. The average amount I have seen them ask for is about $2000. It is a supply and demand situation, so only you can decide what you are willing to pay for a domain name. Be very careful how you purchase the domain and get something in writing or use an escrow service. There are many such services you can find using a search engine.

Wait for the domain you want to expire â€“ A lot of people assume that they can just wait for a domain name to expire, then scoop it up on the expiration date. After all, you can see the expiration date when you do a whois search. Unfortunately, it isnâ€™t that easy. When a domain name expires, it isnâ€™t immediately available to be purchased. Instead, it goes into a sort of â€œholdâ€ status for about 45 days so that the original owner can reclaim it. Waiting for a domain name to expire is almost NEVER a good idea, especially when they are automatically being re-registered.

Registrar Warning: Domain registrars use this hold status as an opportunity to charge domain owners a re-registration penalty fee once the original expiration date passes. How nice of them. Some registrars also prevent domain names to be moved to other registrars when they are close to their expiration date (even before they expire). Lets say that your domain name is about to expire in 20 days, and you choose to move it to another registrar. Some registrars wonâ€™t let you until you pay for ANOTHER year of registration.

Another Registrar Warning: It is now getting MUCH harder to purchase expired domains because they are being automatically re-registered the MOMENT they are available. Almost ANY web site that has the least little bit of traffic on it is being re-registered by unscrupulous companies that use the domains for â€œlink farmsâ€, â€œsplogsâ€, and they fill them with content from â€œblog scraperâ€ content or other search links. You have probably seen one of these sites when you accidentally typed a domain name in incorrectly. A link farm is a plain-looking, small, cheesy search engine that is completely automated. Domains couldnâ€™t be automatically re-registered to these companies unless they had inside help from registrars, and this is part of the problem with the domain name registry system today. Why does someone go through all this trouble to re-register domain names and put bogus content on them? Simple: Google and other sites pay people for link traffic. There are many stories in the news about people that do this and make a full-time living off of these junk web sites. It isnâ€™t illegal, but it should be.

Add a hyphen to the name you want – Adding a hyphen is an easy way to find an available alternative to the name you want. Most special characters are not allowed, but hyphens are allowed.

Use an optional TLD – If the .COM suffix (known as a Top Level Domain, or TLD) is not available, many companies also choose to use “.NET” or “.US” or “.ORG” or “.INFO” or “.TV”. There are MANY more TLDs, but these that I have mentioned are the most popular. They sort of all work the same, but most of the different TLDs represent countries (.TV is an example). Some registrars charge a little more for TLDs like “.US”. Obviously, .COM is always the best choice if it is available, because most people are used to seeing them and typing them in.

Avoid .INFO – I personally do not recommend the .INFO TLD because they are used quite a bit by spammers and especially sploggers. This is because they can be purchased in bulk cheaply. Some spam filtering solutions give a stronger weight to these domains.Use your location – Sometimes adding a city or state name or abbreviation can help differentiate you from another company located somewhere else that has the same name as your company.

Trademarked Names and Words – Be careful not to use trademarks in your domain name that do not belong to you. Large law firms now employ special Internet search tools to look for infringements on trademarks that their clients own.
Service Categories – Think about the services that you offer. If your company specializes in a particular area that is specific, that might be a way to find more words to use in your domain name.

Product Names – Like service categories, if you have specific products that you wish to market on your web site, then perhaps they can be part of your domain name.
Adjectives – Think about the types of people that buy from you, and the adjectives that people use to describe the products that you sell. Also consider the advantages of your product or service. An online thesaurus can help.
Slogans (taglines) – A short tagline for you company can make a nice domain name if it is short enough.

Abbreviations and Acronyms – Many domain names that are 4-5 letters are now all taken. Every combination. But if you are one of the lucky ones that has an acronym that is still available, it could be your best domain name. But be careful about difficult acronyms. Sometimes a word is easier to remember than an acronym.

Keep Your Names Short

While it may be tempting to keep adding words to your domain name, the golden rule is to keep them as short as possible. Longer domain names DO NOT help with search engines. Search engines give little or no relevance to the words in your domain. The longer your domain name is, the harder it is for your clients to type it in. Also donâ€™t forget that your domain name is used for branded email as well. This means that everyone who wants to email you will also have to type in your new domain name every time they type your email address.

The domain you want is available! Now what?

You need to register it. The question is, which registrar should you use? Network Solutions, GoDaddy, Enom, Delaware.Net, or who? There are hundreds of domain name registrars, and hundreds of thousands of resellers of these registrars. Delaware.Net is a reseller of TuCows, which is the most ethical and friendly registrar for hosting companies. When you register a domain name with my company, we use TuCows or another quality registrar. You still own your domain name, and resellers like us only make a dollar or two on domain name registrations. There isnâ€™t a lot of profit (if any) in this part of the business. There are companies that I do not recommend, including GoDaddy and Enom. Enom is the provider for Domain Registry of America, which is one of those companies that sends people fake renewal invoices in the mail hoping that people will renew their domain with them accidentally. As long as Enom allows this to go on, I canâ€™t recommend them. GoDaddy is an inexpensive domain registrar because they use (sell) your information, and they WILL target your with advertisements for their hosting services. Obviously, most hosting companies canâ€™t recommend GoDaddy for this reason, but that is the reason why GoDaddy is a couple of dollars cheaper than other registrars (because they make up the loss by selling your information and upselling other services to you). Network Solutions is also a domain name registrar that I do not recommend. Network Solutions has the worst support, and they make it VERY hard for their customers to get information changed. They also make it very painful when you are trying to move your domains away from them to other registrars. Network Solutions is one of those companies that charges penalties when you try to move your domain name away when it is close to its expiration date. Always read the fine print of your registrarâ€™s terms and conditions before you chose them.

Make sure you own your domain name after you pay for it

I know this title looks strange, but it is possible to purchase a domain name and still not be the owner of it. This is very rare today, but I still see this happen from time to time. Always make sure that if someone else is registering your domain name for you, that this information is accurate, and the administration contact information should be someone that will be with the organization for some time, and who is trustworthy.

When a domain name is registered, there are three areas of the registration form for contact information:

Registrant â€“ this is the organization that owns the domain name. Make sure that this is the legal name of your company.

Administrative Contact â€“ This is the person that has the authoritative rights to change the domain name information.

Technical Contact â€“ this contact information is usually that of the hosting company that is hosting the domain.

Again, make sure that this information is accurate ANNUALLY, and always make sure that someone at your company is the administration contact. Donâ€™t let your web designer or hosting company be the admin contact. Also make sure it is your companyâ€™s name and address in the registrant section. If this information is not yours, then you can lose ownership of your domain name.

How many domain names should you register?

If you have a few names that you have a hard time deciding on, and you feel in your gut that they are all good choices, then register them all. Domains are inexpensive, after all, so grab a few if you think you will actually use them. Just donâ€™t go hog-wild. I had one client that came to me after he registered 1,500 domain names, back when they were $35 each just a few years ago. That cost him $52,500 retail PER YEAR! He didnâ€™t end up paying full price, but he had received bad advice from someone that told him registering his name a bunch of different ways would help him with search engines. If he had come to me first, I could have saved him a lot of money. He ended up wasting about $80,000 on useless domain names. I myself have about 50 domain names after being in this industry for ten years, and I actually use about half of them. Unless you are a really large company or you have lots of products that each need to be trademarked, then I would keep your domains to five or ten tops.

Reasons for Registering Multiple Domain Names

Sometimes it makes sense to register more than one domain name for your organization. Here are some instances where it makes sense:

* Ad Campaigns – When I see a domain name for a company in an advertisement that has additional information attached to it for tracking purposes, it sometimes turns me off. Sometimes I see that and I only type in the root domain. So if an add in the Wall Street Journal says â€œvisit our web site at www.oursite.com/wsjâ€, I might not type in the â€œwsjâ€ because I know that is just for tracking. A more clever way to track ad campaigns is to create a domain name around the ad campaign that doesnâ€™t necessarily contain your companyâ€™s name. Keep in mind that if you have a good web analytics reporting system at your disposal, it is not necessary to register additional domains, beca

* Mailing List Domains â€“ If you have a successful web site today without using an email mailing list, then consider yourself lucky. An email mailing list that keeps your companyâ€™s name fresh in your clientâ€™s minds is a very important part of web marketing. The down side of mailing lists is that they can sometimes be mistakenly flagged as spam, even if they are completely opt-in. There are many reasons why this can happen, and I will cover them in another article. To keep your main email safe and not blocked, it makes sense to use a separate domain name for your email campaigns. So if your domain name is someorganization.com, you could have a domain name like someorganziationnews.com to keep your business email from being blocked. Using a mailing list service is also another option that you can use to protect your main domain, but you could use your own email list domain to host an archive of your previous newsletters.

Reasons to NOT Register Multiple Domain Names

Sub-Domains (hostnames) can sometimes work just as well â€“ When you host your new domain name with a web site hosting company, it is possible to create additional sub-domains, AKA hostnames for free.

Domains donâ€™t help with search engine placement â€“ Some people assume that their domain name choice will have a big affect on search engine ranking. This is not true. The content and popularity of your web site will have an affect on your search engine positioning, but your domain name will not. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is out of the scope of this article, but I will post more articles on this soon.

How many years should you register your domain names for?

Domain names can now be pre-registered for up to ten years. If your domain name matches the name of your business, or you are sure that you are going to keep your domain name for years to come, then I would recommend registering it for at least three years. This eliminates any chance of forgetting to renew your domain name.

Donâ€™t lose your domain name by accident!

It IS possible to lose your domain name if the company you register it from doesnâ€™t alert you when your domain is close to expiration. One thing that I have seen happen, is that someone will register their domain name for just one year, then they change their email address. This is a MAJOR problem for that person because registrars ONLY try to contact you by email. If you change your email address and you don’t change it on your domain name registrations, then your registrar will not be able to contact you. If one of my customers has their domain name registered with us, and it is getting close to expiration, we actually pick up the phone and try to contact them before they lose it. This is rare but it does happen. Many people assume that their hosting company is liable for their domain name renewals, and this is not the case. You are responsible for your own domain names and their renewals. It is a really good idea to put a reminder on your calendars so that you don’t miss your domain renewal anniversaries.

Good Luck!

The domain name registry system, process, and competitive landscape is getting more complex, just as web sites and email are getting more complicated. I hope that these tips help you to find the perfect domain name for your web site. If you have any questions about this article, or about domain names in general, post them here in my blog.

Why Most Companies Shouldn’t Co-Locate a Server

john — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 02:33:12 +0000

Your company uses its web site and online applications more and more as an integral part of your business. Your sites are getting bigger, and more applications are being integrated into them. Or perhaps you have grown from one web site to five or more sites. No longer is your web site merely a brochure for your company, it has now become “mission critical” to your business operation.This is the stage when many companies outgrow shared web site hosting from a web site hosting company. Shared hosting is when your site resides along with other web sites on the web hosting’s companies servers. Those other sites belong to other cutomers of the web site host. With your own server, your sites can enjoy more hardware processing power, more hard drive space, and you can also install your own applications on the server that may or may not be provided by most web site hosting companies.

The decision is… do you rent (managed server), or do you buy (co-located server)? The vast majority of companies think that collocated is better becase THEY own the server. But in all actuality, managed hosting is safer, less expensive, and less of a liability for your company.

Here’s why.

When you co-locate your server at a datacenter, you are basically purchasing a server and software, then using the datacenter for bandwidth, power, rack space, air conditioning, security, and all of the other features that a datacenter provides. Co-location has fallen out of favor and has been replaced in great part by managed server hosting. With managed server hosting, the datacenter provides you with a pre-configured server to meet your needs. Since you are the only client on this server, you are free to add most popular applications and server programs to the server on your own. You are typically given root access to the managed server so that you can modify it as you wish, within some limitations.

Problems with Server Co-location

*High Initial Cost
You have to purchase the server and all of the software for it. We have clients that have spent $7,000 for one 2U application server after all was said and done. Obviously you do not need to spend that kind of money to get your own server hardware, but if your applications NEEDED a $7,000 server, it makes more sense to pay a monthly fee for the hardware and the software instead of purchasing it or going through the hassle to lease it.

*Ticking Time Bombs – Patches and Updates
You are responsible for all patches and updates that need to be performed on your serverâ€™s software. If you do not patch the software and it gets hacked, you could lose everything. That is your responsibility. Yes, I have seen it happen to clients. I have seen a client install software on their server as seemingly innocent as a PHP forum server. Then they forget about it, and a couple of months later an exploit is released for the version they are running. Unless the client is watching for updates on their software, the server becomes a target, and is eventually discovered by hackers. Keep in mind that the process of probing for vulnerabilities like this is automated by software â€“ so your serverâ€™s weaknesses could become discovered very quickly. Clients that do not have a system administrator on staff should never consider collocation for the patches and update reason alone.

* Depreciation and Upgrades
If your business thrives, you will need more and better servers eventually. It is very rewarding for us to see a client start out with one server and move up to a full rack as they grow. When you own the equipment, you have the additional hassle of having to upgrade and purchase new equipment as it ages or as you grow. Typically the average life span for an Internet server is three years tops. When you lease a server from a large computer company (Dell, IBM, HP, etc.) , you have to keep this in mind. Even if you do not grow, and you remain with the same number of servers for years, the software that you run will become old and will need to be upgraded. Software companies continually improve their products, and they release new versions so that they can make money and stay in business. The point here is that you WILL have additional annual expenses for software upgrades that you need to be aware of and that are included in your budget.

* Manufacturer Warranty Work is Sketchy
Some customers like the peace of mind that warranties can provide from big computer companies, and this is on one of the motivating factors in why some clients want to purchase their own server. But those warranties come with a steep price, and are little comfort when you are waiting 1-3 days for replacement parts to arrive and be installed by the manufacturer’s rent-a-tech. I have seen this happen and it is not pretty when a client is waiting for a tech to show up and their server is dead in the water. This scenario is true with all major hardware manufacturers.

* Clients Purchase Servers for the Wrong Reasons
Some clients purchase servers because they have had a bad experience with a previous hosting company. With â€œshared hostingâ€, their web site was more than likely on a server with many other clients. In that scenario, it is unlikely that the client was able to install all of the software that they wanted to on the server, or have the root access necessary to do much configuration of the software on the server. Shared hosting also introduces more risk when applications are running on the server, because poorly-programmed web applications can crash a server easily. So the client looks for a new host, and decides that this time they will have their own server so that they can run it the way that they want it to. There is also a bit of â€œtinkererâ€™s prideâ€ in being able to setup oneâ€™s own Internet server. But these motivations for going the colo route are detrimental to the clientâ€™s company because the costs, time, and risks are not considered at this stage. There is also the fear that if something goes wrong with the host, the client can take his server and move it somewhere else easily. This isn’t actually the best scenario if things go wrong with the host relationship, because your sites will be down during the move. And physically moving servers from one host to another is never as easy as you plan. With a dedicated server, you can migrate data and apps from one dedicated host to the other without all of the hassle of picking up the server.

Reasons Why Managed Servers are Better than Server Co-location

* Lower Employee Cost
Collocation customers MUST have their own in-house IT employees to manage the server properly. A skilled server administrator can earn a very high salary, which adds to your overhead. If you do not have a full-time, in-house IT person, then collocation should not even be considered. Part-time IT staff, combined with server collocation, equals an extended outage waiting to happen.

* Lower Initial Investment
With a managed server, your initial fees are usually limited to server setup and the first monthâ€™s rent on the server. The iniitial cost of collocation involve the same setup fees, PLUS the hardware, software, and additional options that come free with dedicated hosting.

* Dedicated Servers are Installed Faster
Managed hosts have servers ready to go. This can save days or even weeks getting your servers configured and launched.

* Look Past The Higher Monthly Fees to See the True Cost Savings
The monthly fees for managed servers are higher than collocation, but when you total up ALL of the expenses that are involved with collocation, managed servers are much less expensive.

* Free OS Patches
With managed servers, typically the host will want to standardize the operating systems that they host. More than likely, the OS that you want to host on will be supported, but with so many distributions of Linux available, it makes sense for the managed hosting company to standardize on a couple of them. This makes tracking upgrades and patches easier across the entire datacenter and your server is patched more quickly.

* Free Software Upgrades
Managed hosting companies get volume discounts on server software, and this usually can be included in your monthly hosting fees. This can save you thousands of dollars initially, and over time you will not have to worry about upgrading much of your server software. There are exceptions to this for unique software, so you should discuss this with your managed hosting company and make sure it is included in your agreement.

* Free Server Monitoring and Emergency Service
Since managed servers are owned by the host, they may monitor them differently than they monitor colocation servers. Monitoring options on colo servers may cost you extra money, while managed monitoring is always included.

* Pre-Configured Backup Servers
Servers break and it is a part of life. Anything with moving parts will fail at some point, so it is important to have spares ready to go. Most collocation customers do not plan well enough to have spare hard drives and servers on-hand in case something fails. This can also be due to the cost of the additional hardware. Good managed hosting companies will have spares on-hand. By standardizing the hardware that they offer, the managed host can insure that they have the right parts on hand for your server.

* Trade-In and Upgrade Options
When you outgrow a collocation server, you have to sell it and purchase a new one. With managed hosting this is not a worry as you can move to a larger server easily.

* Better Data Backups
Data backups are usually an add-on service to collocation, so you will need to find out what that costs. Most clients do their own backups to remote servers so this is not a major problem. Unfortunately, however, there are many people that do not have a disaster recover plan in place, so they are again creating a ticking time bomb. Managed hosting servers may contain backup services as part of the agreement. Make sure that you budget for a solid backup and recovery strategy.