IT departments are under pressure as never before. The 2019 pressures of malware, IOT, the cloud, and a static or shrinking budget are still there but overtaken by the 2020 imperative of supporting new working styles.
Remote working is no longer a nice to have, it is the new reality for many businesses and their employees. IT must now ensure the security of apps and data over remote connections, including BYOD.
Supporting online access by existing and potential customers is becoming the norm for many organisations, which requires the revamp of back-office procedures, including their supporting IT services.
IT in many companies has never been busier.
An option being looked at by many is how to offload the daily bread and butter workload to release staff to undertake new urgent tasks within the existing budget.
Within the range of options available, running from Internet hosting to full outsourcing, shared server hosting is proving popular with medium-sized businesses.
There are several levels of hosting:
1. Basic Hosting. A company hosts external websites and corporate email on the Internet. It’s also commonly used for e-commerce applications;
2. Shared Hosting. Shared hosting is using a server shared between you and other users of the same physical infrastructure. The users share the running costs of the server. This helps organizations needing something a little larger and more responsive than Basic Hosting.
3. VPS Hosting. The middle road, and similar to shared hosting. VPS Hosting provides a full virtual server environment. Each physical server hosts several VPS environments, sharing physical resources between each.
Basic Hosting is cheap and cheerful but tends to be slow and limited in services. They often are underpowered for adequate support of a full-on corporate environment. Shared hosting can suffer from the same problem. It may be less secure because you are sharing the same virtual environment with other users.
For many, outsourcing systems to the same Internet infrastructure hosting the company website and email does not provide sufficient power and flexibility. Similarly, outsourcing the entire data center infrastructure to a managed service provider (“MSP”) doesn’t make economic sense.
In the middle lies Virtual Private Server (“VPS”), in which an MSP provides virtual servers on shared physical servers or a dedicated physical server. The level of outsourcing depends on individual needs. The outsourcing extent can range from renting self-managed space on a hosted infrastructure to a full-service outsource of the entire infrastructure and its operation and management.
The benefits of adopting a VPS environment include:
1. Cost Management
a. Fixed infrastructure costs and cost planning can be much more accurate. Typically, IT operational budgets vary, and it could be challenging to find additional resources to meet unexpected demands.
2. VPS Hosting may be cheaper than existing operational costs.
3. Outsourcing of routine daily tasks, releasing your staff for new developments, and completing delayed projects.
4. Flexibility. If you need additional infrastructure resources, these are usually provided more quickly with an MSP than by yourself.
VPS hosting using shared server hosting is a quick and cost-effective way to address today’s challenges.