5 Reasons to Keep Your Hosting On-Campus
Here’s part two of the hosting series looking at whether you should move your website hosting off-campus or leave it on-campus.
In this edition, we’ll look at reasons to leave your hosting on campus.
1. Security
Your campus network may have more safeguards in place then a hosting company when it comes to firewalls, network monitoring, filtering, etc. Most hosting companies I’m sure keep a very close on eye on these types of things, but if you are nervous about access to your data, keep it on-campus. However, if you machine is compromised, hosting on-campus may give intruders access to other devices on your network. If someone 0wnz your hosting account, the attack should not affect other campus systems.
2. Location, Location, Location
As they say in real estate, sometimes the best feature about a house is the location. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to walk down the hall or across campus to get at your server. You may need to change a backup tape or run a quick software update. Depending on your IT setup, you may not have access to your server directly.
3. Baby got back(up)
At least at my school, every night a backup is made of my server to tape, and several tapes are kept on a rotation. Hosting companies backup data (make sure they do!), but restoring that backup may be time-intensive and cost money. It may behoove you to have a hot spare, either a server or data set somewhere you can get at easily. I’ve started keeping a gzipped tarball at S3. You can never be too sure.
4. Bandwidth
Bandwidth is at a premium on many campuses. By moving your site off-campus, you reduce the amount of traffic coming in and going out, but you’ve got to be aware that you may see an increase in bandwidth usage as your campus community must now leave the borders of your network to get to your site. One answer may be keeping your intranet internal and your public-facing site off-campus.
5. ..and the law won
At the end of the day, your administration may just say no. Sadly, that’s the way things go sometimes. If you’re really adamant about moving your site, gather up some additional data and take it back for approval.
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Mike,
You’re really stretching to come up with five good reasons aren’t you? Yup I just called you out on it.
You could even argue that every single one of those things mentioned is a negative. I mean come on do you really believe that your campus security is better than a well established web hosting company? They have network admins on staff that do nothing but make sure the servers are secure where most campuses network admins also have multiple other duties. The only argument there would be the number of hack attempts are less likely to a college web server than one hosted through a hosting company that also has lots of other servers to hack.
I won’t go through every point… but you see where I’m going. Admit it your convinced off-campus is the way to go.
Also when the heck are you going to add the subscribe to comments plug-in so I don’t have to keep coming back to see your response to this post!?