New provider needed for corporate site.
The company I work for is significantly ramping up it's on-line presence. We already take a number of payments online, and are expecting that to grow significantly in the future. Sadly, due to neglect, our website is hosted on a $17.95 a month shared hosting account. I did just inherit control of the website, so I take no blame!
While I could manage the server, it's not something I want to do. The website was just something thrown into my job description because I'm capable of handling it. It's no where near my full time job. So I'm looking for a managed provider. At the current time our space and bandwidth requirements are extremely minimal, and while it'll grow somewhat with our new site, I highly doubt it'll ever go above 1 gigabyte of space and 100 gigabytes of bandwidth.
So questions I have for you are:
1.) Would you go with a VPS? We're looking for 100% uptime, as we're in the financial services industry. Downtime just isn't acceptable anymore. I know a clustered solution would seem even better, but it's so hard to go for that when some of our requirements are so minimal. Would it be possible to do a redundant VPS system? There will be customer information stored in a database, so I really don't want that being transferred around through the web.
2.) Along with serving customers direct, we also work with a number of other financial institutions. We already have a "portal" site setup to handle this site, and are hosting the server in house. We only have 2 T1 lines (and they're not setup in BGP, obviously). With the growth, we need more bandwidth. Would you recommend putting this site on an entirely different server? Again, we'll be dealing with some sensitive data.
3.) What providers would you recommend? I have prior relationships with ServINT & WiredTree, both of whom I loved being with, but that was when I was in the web hosting world. While the company I work for does not have ISO, SAS, PCI DSS, or HIPAA certifications, we will soon, and I'd like our providers to also have some sort of certification.