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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Jott - the next killer higher ed web app?
Ok, I’m late on the Jott bandwagon, I know, but I tried out the service today and it’s got me thinking about how we can use Jott in higher ed.
What’s Jott? Jott is, at its core, a speech to text transcription service. You call into Jott and leave yourself, or anyone you set up as a contact, a message. It’s really that simple. I called in several times today and it transcribed everything I threw at it.
At first glance, it’s a great organization app that will keep your schedule in order and allow you to remind yourself about things you need to do, especially after meetings. I’m always forgetting stuff right after a meeting that I need to do.
To me, what makes Jott a potential killer app is its “link” service. Through Jott, you can connect to other services and push your updates through Jott.
Here’s an example. It’s very easy to link up your Twitter account to Jott. You can call Jott, and say you want your message sent to Twitter. You talk, it types and moments later your twit is posted.
It’s not just Twitter - Jott can post to Google Calendar, Jaiku, your Wordpress blog, and so on.
So let’s look at the higher ed uses. You can call Jott and report the happenings of a baseball game and send them to Twitter. You can keep your events calendar up to date on the fly. You could send a quick note to the Tumblr page you set up for your campus group. It really makes things simple.
The use that really gets me excited is the use of Jott in an emergency situation. God forbid, let’s assume something bad happens on your campus and your network is down. Let’s also assume, you still have cell coverage or a landline. You can have Jott set up to send updates to an off-site emergency blog hosted at Wordpress.com or Blogger.
You dial into Jott, post a status update or further instructions, and it immediately gets posted on your blog. That update triggers your RSS feed update, which users can receive by email or feed reader. If you use a service like Twitterfeed, your Twitter feed will also be updated automatically, keeping even more people in the loop.
It’s also great for non-technical people who may need to update your community about a situation. We use e2campus as an emergency notification tool, and it works great, but for a novice user getting a message out can be a bit daunting. Imagine the ease of having that person call into Jott and say the update and let the technology handle the rest.
I’m not saying put all your eggs in the Jott basket in case of emergency, but it could definitely have a place in your emergency procedures.
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