Although we are in the business of assisting firms locate the best hosting & colocation services out there, we decided that we should share some of our insight for those that may approach this without us.

Cultural fit

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Ensure that you choose a provider with a good fit. For example if you are a SaaS or an ASP in a fast moving environment that requires changes to be made on the fly you should understand the process for such a change. Can these services be added via portal with known scheduled pricing or do you have to track down a sales person, have a meeting, get a formal quote, sign and then fax the quote over to the hosting provider? If you are outsourcing an ERP or CRM application and you follow a rigorous change management process then your larger and less nimble hosting provider may fit the bill perfectly.

Capital Expenditure

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Ask your prospective hosting provider if the costs of a dedicated server are the same on month 1 as they are month 35. Many providers will divide the hardware costs over the term of the contract to give competitive rates early in the contract. Late in the term add-ons can easily become 2x the original price.

Application Management Capability

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Many will offer to manage your application which is fine, but it’s important to realize that these applications are usually items such as IIS, Apache, Tomcat, .NET, and JBOSS. Rarely will they be speaking specifically to your application (which includes the business logic and custom code). Some providers will be aware of your application but not the management of it. We’ve found some providers that do a good job monitoring the application with scripted monitoring transactions but they still don’t “manage” the app.

Virtual Server Instances

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For those providers that can offer dedicated and virtual servers, ensure that the virtual instances are not being created on a dedicated piece of hardware that you are solely paying for. This tends to defeat the purposes of purchasing separate VM instances and forces you to purchase computing power that isn’t needed right away.

Company Size

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This is standard procurement criteria but long story short, if you are the smallest sized client of a hosting firm, getting an audience with executives when things go bad will be difficult. Threats of canceling will not have the weight you would like.

Introductions to Executive Management

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Best done in the pre-sales phase, ask to have a call with an executive who will share contact information with you. Should things go awry, you’ll have an ally higher up that can assist with issues that are chronic or not being addressed by non-management personnel.

Diagrams

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Ask for a diagram to be provided that matches the sales proposal you’ve received from your hosting provider. Learn what hardware hosts your virtual instances and what components are provided and managed.

Scope

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Ensure you have a clear understanding of scope. A few examples; If you are connecting your environment to the internet and an MPLS network, ensure that your MPLS network provider will work with the hosting provider to supply the proper hardware and management. Each firm should be allowed to open tickets on your behalf to resolve network connectivity issues. The hosting provider will need to ask the proper questions about your MPLS network in order to size the firewalls and ensure seamless connectivity between the 2 networks where applicable. Ensure that private network traffic not destined to the internet doesn’t get billed to you from the hosting provider due to poor network design (traffic passing out of the firewalls and immediately back in).

Renewal Terms

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Many hosting providers will have an auto-renew clause in their contracts which will auto-renew for the exact term of the original contract. With the responsibilities of IT managers these days, it’s difficult to track term dates to catch the auto-renewal. Request a month to month renewal clause or a 6 month renewal at the original rates contracted if possible. Additionally, ensure that all additions during the life of the contract result in all components expiring at the same time on the original contract end date.

Ask peers

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Check in with managers in similar roles at other firms for their experience with a certain hosting provider. Certainly ask for references from your final 2 hosting choices. Asking for references during the initial RFP phase will yield poor results as hosting firms don’t wish to subject their reference clients to a barrage of reference checks without having a qualified opportunity at hand.

Service Level Agreements

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Certainly a standard item for most hosting providers, but these are usually crafted to provide minor financial credits back to your firm should you suffer outages of a certain duration. Compare your SLA’s from all providers but ensure there’s an exit clause in the contract for “chronic failures” which is a on-going issue that isn’t resolved within a certain time period.

International Connectivity

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If you have overseas employees connecting to the application you are seeking to have hosted, ensure that you do testing based on a sample server or IP address with the prospective hosting provider. Having a large network isn’t enough to ensure latency free connections as peering and routing issues can slow your connection down. If you experience poor responses from multiple vendors you will need to increase your hosting budget for caching services or possibly implementing an MPLS connection to that international audience that you will serve.

Server Specifications

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If you are going to implement dedicated hardware and lease or rent it, load up on RAM. Adding RAM later is costly and will force the server down to perform the upgrade. The cost of going from 4 to 8GBs of RAM on a rented or leased machine is nominal.

Utility Storage and Backup

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Consider your growth carefully when choosing a utility vs dedicated storage and backup. Certain large scale backups and storage don’t financially scale well in shared/hosted model. Share conservative estimates with an additional fudge factor so that the best decision can be made in collaboration with your hosting provider. Utility storage is excellent and allows small incremental growth without the headaches of purchasing a NAS or SAN provided that you don’t need double digit terabytes on day one of your deployment.

There are other facets to consider as well but with these guidelines you’ve covered many of the issues we’ve seen pop up with past deployments. We are always available to assist if you chose to not take this path alone. Call us during business hours at 703-665-1000 or info@coloadvisor.com