5 reasons to move your hosting off-campus
For many of you out there, this past weekend was your commencement ceremony (or ceremonies, depending on your school’s size). Ours was sadly inside due to inclement weather, and it was the last for our current president, who is not exactly retiring but moving on to be closer to family. He’s has done great things here during the last twelve years, and he’ll be missed.
Photo by Digital:Slurp
This week, I started a list of stuff to do this summer. It’s a great time to tackle some larger projects, and of the largest I’m looking at is deciding where to host my school’s website. The service agreements run out on my on-campus hosted hardware this month, so I’ve got to decide if I shell out big bucks for new servers or move the website off-site.
I’ve been thinking of a few reasons to move the site off-campus. In a future post, I’ll also detail five reasons to leave your web server on-campus.
So, why move your hosting off-campus?
1. 24/7/365 Support
We’re a small school with a limited team to manage our server farm. Sometimes I need to call someone at 3 in the morning and have them at the machine ready to fix the issue. I’m not diminishing the knowledge or dedication of our IT staff, they do amazing stuff, but off-hours support is a challenge.
2. Emergency Response and Availability
Having your site prepared for an emergency is a big topic right now. If an emergency happens on your campus, having your site off-site may be beneficial for a few reasons. First, you are taking the crush of traffic off your campus and onto your web host. Second, if your network is affected by a weather emergency, the website can still be used as an information resource, especially if you have a setup like one that uses a third-party tool, like Jott.
3. Reduction in bandwidth usage on campus
Our site serves a lot of traffic. I’ve been slowing migrating content to S3, but there’s still a lot of traffic going out over our pipes. Moving the site would reduce the load a bit, though I’ll talk about a potential downside to this in the next post.
4. Dolla Dolla Bill Y’all
Hosting off-site can also make economic sense. If you are buying, say, two servers and associated maintenance plans, this can easily cost over $10,000, and that’s before you start adding in software costs, backup costs and more. By hosting off-site, you are letting your hosting company worry about the infrastructure and you are spreading the cost of hosting over several years.
5. The kids grow so up so fast
For some institutions, adding server power is as easy as turning on a new server, tweaking the load balancer and you’re good to go. For a small institution like mine, this is much harder to do. Hosting off site allows you to grow and add capacity at lower cost. Doing so on-campus would incur additional cost and time. There are several hosts now, like Mosso, that will scale your site on the fly to handle the load during emergencies, Diggs, etc.
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2 Responses to “5 reasons to move your hosting off-campus”
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Just for completeness I feel obligated to link this to the discussion that’s going on in the University Web Developer forums about Hosted vs On Campus Web Server.
All good points here and personally I think for most colleges off campus hosting benefits far outweigh the disadvantages.
I would be skeptical about Mosso they have had some kinks. I’m sure you will run into people that will say they are getting better which is true just proceed with caution. This is coming from a former customer (I was a customer twice).