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As enterprise customers' Web site needs become more sophisticated, service providers must adapt their Web hosting capabilities - or face the prospect of losing business

As the World Wide Web matures, the Web hosting needs of enterprises will change dramatically. Online household penetration rates are approaching 50% in the U.S., and business-to-business e-commerce is expected to be a trillion-dollar opportunity within three years. That means more traffic will be going to richer, more sophisticated sites.

Today, Web users are conducting business interactively on Web sites, querying multiple databases, exploring rich multimedia sites with streaming video, engaging in real-time messaging and customizing and personalizing their interactions with the site.

In this more demanding and mature Internet, and as enterprise Web strategies evolve to encompass more ambitious objectives, Web sites based on a shared hosting environment no longer will suffice. As a result, many companies are moving to dedicated and co-located Web-hosting solutions from service providers to support next generation Web strategies that are throughput-intensive and provide a more robust interactive experience (Figure 1).

For service providers, devising a Web hosting strategy entails balancing between three overriding dimensions.

Performance. Simply put, how fast is your network? What is the response time for the typical enterprise customer? End-user retention studies suggest that the average page must load within eight seconds or the user will leave the site. What throughput can enterprise customers expect from your network?

Complexity. Site sophistication is a critical consideration in offering Web hosting services. Does the enterprise's site have complex transactions? Is it multimedia-rich? Do they anticipate many simultaneous users/visitors or unusually numerous hits? Is their site input/output-intensive or processing-intensive? If so, can your network support these applications without getting bogged down? Can you meet an enterprise customer's demand for a high-performance network to support its e-commerce applications?

Availability. As the strategic importance of a site increases, uptime and 24-hour availability become increasingly critical. Although a service interruption may not be catastrophic for a static first generation Web site, downtime simply is not an option for e-business Web sites that offer e-commerce and customer service options. What level of redundancy do your enterprise customers require for conducting e-business? Can you offer this level?

Service providers need to address all these issues to successfully host the e-commerce needs of their enterprise customers. If a service provider can't meet the requirements of increasingly complex Web sites, the enterprise customer will take its business elsewhere.

Virtual hosting: No longer enough

Given the dearth of Internet-savvy talent required to self-host a Web site - and continual time-to-market pressures - it's not surprising that many companies are choosing to outsource the hosting of their Web site to a service provider. For companies embarking on their first Web site implementation, virtual hosting often is a logical choice.

With virtual hosting (sometimes called "shared hosting"), a company's Web site resides on a service provider's Web server - along with the Web sites of many other companies and individuals. In short, multiple customers share a hard disk drive, a central processing unit and network bandwidth furnished by the service provider.

The advantages of this arrangement to enterprise customers are straightforward and compelling. First, it's inexpensive. Virtual hosting is the least costly outsourced hosting alternative and an effective way to quickly get on the Web.

But while this fast, low-cost solution is attractive, it's unsuitable for all but the most basic Web sites for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, the company is at the mercy of its "virtual neighbors" on the server. If another Web site sharing the server is resource-intensive (for example, making many database queries or experiencing a high volume of hits), that can slow down the company's e-business performance.

Unfortunately, this becomes a limiting factor when companies want to increase the sophistication of their sites. Although service providers do their best to mitigate performance problems, the fact remains that customers still are sharing the resources of a single server with other customers. E-commerce, partner collaboration, streaming media and file storage all increase the complexity of the Web site beyond what a simple virtual-host service can support.

Dedicated Web hosting: The right solution

In response to these challenges, an increasing number of service providers today offer dedicated Web-hosting services. As the name implies, dedicated services provide enterprise customers with their own unique Web server and everything necessary to run a Web site, including hardware, network connection and software. Some dedicated offerings also include other services, such as site monitoring, rebooting, backups and security (Figure 2).

For companies looking to take their Web strategies to the next level, dedicated hosting offerings deliver numerous benefits:

- Greater reliability. With a dedicated server, enterprise customers have the greater reliability that comes from complete autonomy over how the server's resources are applied and deployed.

- Bigger servers. Dedicated hosting servers typically offer gigabytes of disk space and provide excellent network throughput. In addition, the site has access to the server's full complement of RAM, which is crucial for serving Web pages efficiently.

- Faster servers. Dedicated servers using the newest generation of Intel or Sun Microsystems processors offer better high-bandwidth connectivity and 256 Mb/s or more of RAM. Because all that horsepower is devoted to the customer's e-business, it now has the opportunity to deploy more sophisticated applications.

- Consistent, predictable performance. Similarly, dedicated hosting also provides more predictable performance because the customer can control how the server is configured and used. In addition, an enterprise is not dependent on another site's unexpectedly high traffic or resource consumption.

- Greater security. While hackers or intrusions into a service provider's network are rare, dedicated sites have an even greater level of protection from these threats because no other sites can be targeted on a dedicated server. Authorized access to the server also is under greater control. Although virtual customers have different accounts, they still share the same server and use the same software. Technically savvy customers could manipulate the software to access other accounts.

- Flexibility. With virtual hosting, a site can use only the software and functions that the service provider makes available. Usually, these are commonly requested features, such as common gateway interface scripts, reporting, statistics and perhaps data management features. With a dedicated server, however, enterprise customers can load, deploy and use the server however they choose. This means they could use it as a Web server, a network drive, a mail server or even a video server.

- Monitoring. Service providers can carefully monitor a site and server to repel unwanted threats, prevent downtime and keep the customer's site running smoothly. This is one of the many selling points to outsourcing the management of a corporate Web site.

- No capital investment. Although the enterprise customer controls and deploys the server as if the company owned it, dedicated hosting services do not require any capital investment. That improves the business cash flow, protects the company from technology obsolescence and allows the enterprise customer to focus on its business. The sidebar on this page outlines the characteristics that enterprises look for in dedicated Web hosting facilities.

The co-location option

When a company's Web application becomes central to its business strategy, many companies seek a greater level of control by purchasing and maintaining their own Web equipment. However, they may not have the sophisticated facilities that provide greater reliability.

Some of the more advanced service providers have responded to the needs of these companies by offering their customers co-located Web hosting. For customers who already have the server hardware and want to take advantage of a service provider's Web operation center facilities, co-location is attractive. Customers own the equipment while the service provider delivers related services - high-speed, scalable bandwidth, backups, monitoring, redundant power, load balancing and other management services.

While virtual hosting will continue to be an attractive option for smaller, less dynamic Web sites, enterprises that are rolling out Internet-centric business models or sophisticated Web strategies will find that dedicated or co-located Web hosting offerings from service providers are more pragmatic and viable option for their more rigorous needs.

While by no means exhaustive, the following checklist contains various features and factors customers consider when evaluating a dedicated hosting service provider's facilities:

- Power. Does the center have access to more than one public power grid? What uninterruptible power supply hardware and strategies does it use? Are backup generators on site?

- Security. Are dedicated servers mounted in separate racks? Are separate, locked cages available for added security or co-location? What security measures are in place (for example, 24-hour video surveillance, security staff, card-key access, locked private cages)?

- Disaster prevention. What mechanisms are used to prevent, detect and respond to fire?

- Network operations center. Is there on-site 24-hour monitoring of traffic to and from dedicated servers? Are the personnel trained to respond to situations?

- Cooling. Is there appropriate fault-tolerant air conditioning? Does the facility have humidity sensors and monitoring? Is the insulation capable?

- Cabling. Enterprises look for high-quality category 6 cabling to ensure support for

1 Gb/s Ethernet networking.

- Racks. How strong and secure are they? Are they large enough to support the enterprise's equipment? What other shelving solutions are available? Are there private suites available for ultra-secure installations?