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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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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Do you have an iPhone icon for your school?
If you’ve got an iPhone (or an iPod touch), go ahead and open www.allegheny.edu up in Safari. Once you’re there, click on the little plus sign and click the “Add to Home Screen” button. Safari will put an Allegheny link on your home screen - and look at that, a custom Allegheny icon. Pretty neat, eh?
If you haven’t specified a custom icon for you page, Safari will show a screenshot. In most cases, it will look like microscopic text and maybe an image. Definitely not the kind of branding you want to do for your school. So, how do you create the icon? Easy.
In Photoshop, I made a 158×158 image. There is some debate as to the best size for these. Some sites create 57×57 icons, but I think its better to make it bigger and let the iPhone/iPod scale it for you. As you can see, I used our “A” logo and our official college colors. I saved it out as a png with transparency. To get it to show up on the phone, you don’t have to add any code to your site, merely put the graphic in your home directory and call it apple-touch-icon.png. That’s it.
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