Saturday, 1 March 2014 Blog ehdf

Choosing A Perfect Hosting Services Provider

A hosting service provider offers data centre space for their clients’ mission critical IT infrastructure. They can also provide leased hardware, software, storage, network and managed services to enable clients’ hosting needs. They can deliver complete IT infrastructure solutions for deploying websites and other enterprise applications in order to maintain high availability. So, a hosting service provider delivers a simpler and more cost effective alternative for hosting as opposed to hosting and managing data in-house.

Here are a few tips that can help you select the right hosting services provider– based on your company’s needs and requirements.

Features and pricing: Price is one of the key consideration factors while choosing a hosting service provider however it should not be the deciding factor. Service features and quality are also very important factors beside costs. One should analyze a service provider based on the depth of the services portfolio, features of the services, flexibility in pricing and packages available and whether solutions can be customized based on your specific requirements.

Area of expertise: Every hosting service provider has its own areas of expertise. Some may specialize in co-location services, some may specialize in shared hosting while others may be experts in managed dedicated or cloud hosting. Since organizations have unique needs, they should evaluate a hosting service provider that is best suited to their requirements. This can be evaluated in terms of the size of the organization, nature of business/industry, nature of the application, availability requirements, security/compliance requirements, etc.

24/7 Support: Depending on the nature of the application hosted, 24/7 support may be critical for an organization. If your website goes down for some unknown reason can the required support and issue resolution happen immediately? Can you get to know what went wrong with your portal or website? How soon will you be back online? Are they easy to contact for support? What’s the average time it takes to respond to a ticket? When they find a problem with a site, what’s their course of action?

Security infrastructure: Security threats may come in many forms, such as network attacks, cyber crimes, etc. Protecting your systems against these is a challenge and requires specialized skills. Your service provider must be able to demonstrate the necessary security tools and processes to ensure the highest level of security for the hosted environment.