Sunday, 6 March 2016 Blog ehdf

Hosting Mini Guide For Startups in Dubai

Hosting for startups in Dubai deserves a lot more thought than what it is accorded right now. They have limited disposable income. And they need to provide near faultless services to prospects so that they turn into customers. If the provided services falters repeatedly, startups may need to close shop even before they get established. Moreover, in a competitive environment in which we reside today, one mistake can lead to a drastic downfall.

For startups, as for any growing business, a turnkey hosting model has several big benefits over hosting on-premises. Some benefits include facilitating better capital investment decisions, accommodating unexpected or unpredictable demand, and reducing the risk of development setbacks and unplanned downtime.

Hosting options available in the market and what we think about each

1. Cloud Hosting: In simple terms, a cloud is a virtual data centre. No doubt, the cloud is everywhere, but is it a silver bullet solution to all the hosting woes of a startup?

Here’s what we think:

– Cloud hosting is good for starting out in Dubai when server needs are unknown and it’s easy to scale up and down quickly

– Best for environments that have differing scale needs on a regular basis (e.g. imagine you normally need 20 servers but for a few hours each night you need 100 servers to crunch data)

Hosted Private Cloud or Public Cloud services: what is right for you? Read more: https://www.ehdf.com/about-ehdf/resource-center/blog/entry/smes-are-embracing-cloud-computing

2. Colocation: Co-location is the renting of physical space in a Service Provider’s premises. It allows an organisation to save costs by hosting some or all of its IT infrastructure offsite instead of building and maintaining their own Data Centre or server rooms in-house.

Here’s what we think:

– Best for maturing startups that can afford acquiring servers and personnel to manage them

– Requires more effort and management compared to the cloud

– Maximum flexibility regarding the hardware used

3. Managed Hosting: In Managed Hosting, customers lease one or more dedicated servers from a Data Centre Service Provider who undertakes the responsibility of managing the servers up to Operating System (OS). In addition, the Service Provider also undertakes the responsibility of providing managed services that include Backup, Storage, Security, Network, and Application & System Administration Services.

Here’s what we think:

– Best for core infrastructure in a 3 – 25 server environment where a relatively constant amount of horsepower is needed (most startups operate this way) and capital is not as plentiful (renting a server is more capital efficient than buying it when getting started)

Let us help you decide the best fit for your startup!