Casey Cook is a writer, technologist, and musician living in South Florida. He worked for over a decade at some of the industry’s largest ISPs and Web Hosting providers in numerous capacities, including Director of Network Operations, Director of Corporate Alliances, and Senior Product Manager.
Evaluating vendor partner relationships and their quality of service is a regular part of doing business. For the same reason that employees are held to performance standards, your vendor partner’s ability to perform is a critical factor in the success of your business. Your managed dedicated server hosting provider is no exception, but it can be difficult to make an accurate assessment in the areas that count the most.
The problem is that comparing managed dedicated server hosts isn’t the same as shopping around for a new home appliance. On the surface of it, most providers seem somewhat similar. Plans are largely defined by processor speed, memory and storage space, and bandwidth. On closer examination, there’s a tremendous difference in the approaches that providers take to deliver service. As many IT managers have learned the hard way, if you make a decision based solely on price point, you are asking for trouble.
White boxes versus brand names
One of the easiest ways for providers to cut corners is with white box server hardware. Throw some off brand motherboards, memory, hard drives and network cards into a rack mount server chassis and you’re ready to go. It might be fine for a computer hobbyist to build his own PCs with hardware that isn’t certified complaint, but is that what you want your business critical web site and other applications running on? Make sure your provider is using brand name high quality hardware.
Support- the 3am call
There was a lot of discussion during the election about the emergency 3am phone call. One of the reasons that resonated is because people actually get those late night calls, and no one knows that better than harried system administrators. When you have to call your provider in the middle of the night, will you be able to talk to an actual human being? Do yourself a favor and answer that question before you have an outage.
Enterprise class infrastructure- they’re already doing it
What’s the best way to know if you have a dedicated sever provider who can deliver world class service? Take a look at who their other customers are. If they have large enterprise customers, then they are already doing it. You benefit from tremendous economies of scale in bandwidth overhead, datacenter redundancy, 24/7/365 support, and technical expertise that would otherwise be budget breaking for the typical SMB. They will also offer related services like managed backup and network attached storage, firewalls, load balancers and other security devices, and high end application support for databases and other software. They can do this because, by virtue of their larger customers, those resources are already in place.
More than most vendor partners, your managed dedicated servers host is a crucial element to the success of your business. In many cases, that provider is responsible for the public face of your company. In a tight, competitive economy smart business are giving them every advantage. When it’s time to review your relationship with your managed dedicated server host, be sure to look deeper than price point and feature set. By measuring the added value of a high functioning host versus the cost of a poor performer, you can be sure your provider is delivering the service you need.
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