The boss is realistic…this doesn’t need to be done tomorrow or even in month. However it needs to be done. The existing site is will stay where it is for now…however we have 3 sister sites that we want to get up and the boss doesn’t want a repeat of being held hostage again.
His thinking is, if it’s in-house and falls apart at least we have control on what to do. We screw up, well we screw up, we deal…if Mr. Smith screws up we have to wait for him and if he decides to disappear for 3 weeks…
Thanks for the advice, lots to think about and I’ll crunch some numbers and see what happens.
Take a look at www.verio.net - A stable company which will host your e-comm sites for as low as 24.95 a month. Then consider what others have said above. I wouldn’t take this in house.
At a place like verio you’ll have redundant bandwidth, soild servers, firewalls, back-up power, and a small army of sysadmin paid to keep up on issues and help you with support.
I used to use verio for bandwidth and I had about 190 IP addresses from them. I forgot to unplug a dev machine from the switch one night and it got cracked. I had an email from verio security the next morning telling me I should have a look at a particular IP address. These guys were on the ball. Of course I felt stupid and said “whoops” but they were cool and just laughed about it with me.
If you compare just the hardware/software costs of a basic server at 2 grand, that’s 80 months of hosting at $24.95 (6 and a half years). You’d be upgrading and investing more money into your servers by a few years. Of course that also doesn’t figure in the costs of your time, bandwidth costs, hardware failures, back up media, etc.
Also consider this. If you have a complete failure on your data (let’s say the computer shorts out and you lose the motherboard and your drive) how quick do you think you can do a bare metal restore? Sure, you’ll have data backups, but you’ll have to get parts, build the system, install the OS, install software, install any patches and configure the lot before you can restore your data.
You might want to try and talk him into BOTH. Put the e-comm site at a place like verio and build an in house web server to play with. Try out different software and configurations. You can host a basic company website on it or something small -or use it to serve files, images, or just use as the development server. Then you can learn the ropes without having to worry about 99.99% uptime. If it dies you can survive a week without it. If it gets cracked you can take it off line and figure out what went wrong.
Holmes, if you do stick with doing this yourself, there are a few things that you really SHOULD hire a web sysadmin for on a contract-consultation basis. Number one on the list is probably the security issue – making sure that the server is safe from web viruses, worms, and other exploits when you launch it – he can probably also give you some tips on where to look for news of new threats appearing, and how to fight them.
I think it would be a much better idea to take control of your site’s software maintenance in-house, but NOT run on your own servers. Site maintenance is fun stuff like PHP and Photoshop, server maintenance is NOT fun stuff like routers and sub-nets and VPNs.
