Outsourcing Web Hosting
As Web sites become more critical to the information infrastructure of companies, there is a growing need to provide high-quality, high-availability solutions. For example, a business selling something only online can’t afford to have its site go down at all. The serving of a site to an e-business is as critical as power and telephone services would be to a traditional business. This trend might be termed the “utilization” of the Web, as some may consider the health and delivery of their Web site as important as other utilities like water and power. However, given that the site must be run in a very efficient and reliable manner, firms quickly discover that it is in fact quite expensive for companies to develop in-house the talents and facilities to run a mission-critical Web site. Therefore, many firms have decided to outsource their Web facilities. Web server outsourcing comes in many flavors, but many of the differences revolve around two factors. The first differentiatin...