DTMark
01-24-2004, 08:43 PM
Hi,
I'm looking for people especially those in the UK who do web design and do, or have done, hosting as well to see if this sounds familiar to anyone and if you have any thoughts on it:
I run my own web design business that I've built up over the years. As I'm knowledgeable enough to admin them, being a developer, I started out with one dedicated server to host Client sites on and I'm now up to three servers.
I went with my own servers for reasons of flexibility - e.g. the ability to install custom components and my own DLLs. However having my own servers also meant I could host third party sites as well bringing in some extra income. Knowing precisely what is on them means I can monitor resource usage very carefully and ensure they run well.
98% of my income is from design work, and the fact we run our own hosting causes us a nightmare for many reasons - the normal ones associated with hosting (support, emergency standby and making sure someone is always around if need be) but also as I've discovered more recently, major problems with finance.
Hosting is considered such a high risk here in the UK that it is shunned by banks and finance companies. For instance we can't use "factoring" for our invoices, because we are also hosts; our merchant account has a ridiculous settlement cycle because one aspect of our business is hosting (it was hard to get one at all), obtaining finance is tricky as the moment hosting is mentioned companies aren't interested, and so forth. It's really holding us up.
With market hosting prices as they are, third party site hosting is unlikely to ever provide any significant income for us relative to hassle (I don't mean to destroy the business model people here have built their businesses on, as I'm sure it can be profitable, but as I'm sure people will testify only with a lot of work to generate volumes that I don't have the time or inclination to put in as it will never be as profitable as design)
But - controlling the hosting gives us certain advantages - e.g. in the event a Customer defaults on their account we can turn their site off which is something which happens regularly; if we outsource we lose much of this control.
However, overall all things considered the obvious answer is to outsource it. However the actual reliability of the hosting is paramount as without it our Clients would go elsewhere.
No "virtual hosting" company I've ever used before has had anything like the uptime we've been able to provide our Clients. Although it has to be said that hosting in the UK is still completely impractical due to cost of bandwidth - we use around 400GB per month which is why our servers are in the US.
SME clients like the fact we offer a complete service and, as having paid say 5,000 GBP for a nice website it's useless if it isn't running reliably. We have enjoyed very high uptime over the last couple of years on our own boxes (hosted by ECUI - a big thumbs up to them, as they are fantastic and well recommended especially for people starting out)
I could possibly split out the hosting and have that running as a completely separate entity and Company but certainly from the dealings I've had, this would not satisfy banks/finance.
In order to be taken seriously by finance companies in the UK we would need to actually go one step further and quite literally have nothing to do with the hosting of our Clients sites. Once they're finished they are handed to the Client who would have to
arrange their own hosting - we could recommend, but that's as far as it could go.
Has anyone else found themselves in this situation and what did you do?
And, alternatively, if there are Companies that would be prepared to offer a very flexible service in terms of taking on all of our hosting, but, without root/admin access giving us the ability to install our own DLLs (e.g. looking after this for us as opposed to us doing it as we wouldn't have root access) where needed and so forth allowing us to grow in terms of bandwidth, *but* not on an outsourced but a recommendation basis dealing with our Clients directly, would you let me know?
Clearly we could just sign up for a "Fasthosts" reseller account over here in the UK as thats what everyone seems to do, but that wouldn't give us the control needed nor I suspect the reliability. That's not intended as a direct criticism of Fasthosts or indeed anyone but from experience larger high volume hosting Companies fall well short of the reliability I'd want for our Clients.
This might be a UK specific issue, I'd be very interested in people's comments. Essentially the future for me lies with building the design business and I must admit I would love to get rid of the hosting aspect but not without too many sacrifices. Can anyone else comment if you have been here - what did or would you do?
I'm looking for people especially those in the UK who do web design and do, or have done, hosting as well to see if this sounds familiar to anyone and if you have any thoughts on it:
I run my own web design business that I've built up over the years. As I'm knowledgeable enough to admin them, being a developer, I started out with one dedicated server to host Client sites on and I'm now up to three servers.
I went with my own servers for reasons of flexibility - e.g. the ability to install custom components and my own DLLs. However having my own servers also meant I could host third party sites as well bringing in some extra income. Knowing precisely what is on them means I can monitor resource usage very carefully and ensure they run well.
98% of my income is from design work, and the fact we run our own hosting causes us a nightmare for many reasons - the normal ones associated with hosting (support, emergency standby and making sure someone is always around if need be) but also as I've discovered more recently, major problems with finance.
Hosting is considered such a high risk here in the UK that it is shunned by banks and finance companies. For instance we can't use "factoring" for our invoices, because we are also hosts; our merchant account has a ridiculous settlement cycle because one aspect of our business is hosting (it was hard to get one at all), obtaining finance is tricky as the moment hosting is mentioned companies aren't interested, and so forth. It's really holding us up.
With market hosting prices as they are, third party site hosting is unlikely to ever provide any significant income for us relative to hassle (I don't mean to destroy the business model people here have built their businesses on, as I'm sure it can be profitable, but as I'm sure people will testify only with a lot of work to generate volumes that I don't have the time or inclination to put in as it will never be as profitable as design)
But - controlling the hosting gives us certain advantages - e.g. in the event a Customer defaults on their account we can turn their site off which is something which happens regularly; if we outsource we lose much of this control.
However, overall all things considered the obvious answer is to outsource it. However the actual reliability of the hosting is paramount as without it our Clients would go elsewhere.
No "virtual hosting" company I've ever used before has had anything like the uptime we've been able to provide our Clients. Although it has to be said that hosting in the UK is still completely impractical due to cost of bandwidth - we use around 400GB per month which is why our servers are in the US.
SME clients like the fact we offer a complete service and, as having paid say 5,000 GBP for a nice website it's useless if it isn't running reliably. We have enjoyed very high uptime over the last couple of years on our own boxes (hosted by ECUI - a big thumbs up to them, as they are fantastic and well recommended especially for people starting out)
I could possibly split out the hosting and have that running as a completely separate entity and Company but certainly from the dealings I've had, this would not satisfy banks/finance.
In order to be taken seriously by finance companies in the UK we would need to actually go one step further and quite literally have nothing to do with the hosting of our Clients sites. Once they're finished they are handed to the Client who would have to
arrange their own hosting - we could recommend, but that's as far as it could go.
Has anyone else found themselves in this situation and what did you do?
And, alternatively, if there are Companies that would be prepared to offer a very flexible service in terms of taking on all of our hosting, but, without root/admin access giving us the ability to install our own DLLs (e.g. looking after this for us as opposed to us doing it as we wouldn't have root access) where needed and so forth allowing us to grow in terms of bandwidth, *but* not on an outsourced but a recommendation basis dealing with our Clients directly, would you let me know?
Clearly we could just sign up for a "Fasthosts" reseller account over here in the UK as thats what everyone seems to do, but that wouldn't give us the control needed nor I suspect the reliability. That's not intended as a direct criticism of Fasthosts or indeed anyone but from experience larger high volume hosting Companies fall well short of the reliability I'd want for our Clients.
This might be a UK specific issue, I'd be very interested in people's comments. Essentially the future for me lies with building the design business and I must admit I would love to get rid of the hosting aspect but not without too many sacrifices. Can anyone else comment if you have been here - what did or would you do?