Often in the world of SaaS, servers and cloud, the big question a company may ask themselves is this: Do I outsource my hosting or build it myself in house? 
Often times on the surface the idea of building, buying your own gear, and running it on your own may appear to be the more cost effective option. However, if you consider the big picture including the emergence of the managed cloud then outsourcing is not only more cost effective, it makes the most sense. Consider these factors when comparing outsourcing vs. building it yourself.
1. Capital Depreciation
Outsourcing is considered an OPEX. There is no hardware to have depreciated over time. When hosting internally you have expensive equipment to purchase as a CAPEX plus maintenance agreements, collocation or utility costs, and other “surprise” investments. Outsourcing presents a predictable monthly recurring expense.
2. Employee Turnover
Employee turnover can happen at any time for many reasons. If key people running your internal environment leave the company, you could be left trying to pick up and maintain critical pieces. Outsourcing removes this risk as you’re under contract with a business that provides and guarantees these services with complete documentation and continuity.
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Effective immediately – INetU offers EU managed hosting in Amsterdam, Netherlands!
INetU’s Amsterdam data center currently supports the Dell servers and Cisco networking equipment we offer in our Allentown location. This includes Dell R410, R510, R710, and R910 series servers. Supported Cisco network equipment includes ASA firewalls and ACE load balancers.
Here is how you can benefit from an INetU’s Amsterdam Managed Hosting:
- One-Stop Management: If you have servers hosted with other providers in Europe, consolidating them with INetU means one point of contact and service level for your server management needs.
- EU Compliance: Compliance sometimes requires hosting sensitive data for European Union clients in Europe, so switching to our Amsterdam location might be a useful alternative to our EU Safe Harbor-certified Allentown location. The new data center complies with PCI DSS physical security requirements (Section 9) and INetU’s services and management practices address all other PCI DSS requirements.
- Local Hosting for European Clients: Hosting your European clients’ data nearby may be perceived as a benefit to them, so you’re ensured to receive the high services levels you’re used to by hosting with INetU domestically. While our world-class network performance means you already have fast delivery times into Europe, you might find hosting out of Amsterdam beneficial the further East your target audience gets.
As with our Chicago location, we are able to set up our Business Continuity Hot Site service to Amsterdam, which includes data replication between your servers at our Allentown facility and your servers at our Amsterdam location.
Look for more INetU locations in the future. If you have any interest in using INetU’s EU managed hosting, don’t hesitate to contact us!
Spend a little time working through PCI DSS and you quickly realize that much of the focus is on understanding and reducing risk. This often means efforting to keep sensitive info on a need-to-know. Here are just a few ways you can improve your Linux security:
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INetU is honored to announce that Netcraft named us the Most Reliable Hosting Company for June 2010. Not only did our network respond to each of their requests over the one-month period, but Netcraft says we are only the second site to do so this year – many thanks to our wonderful staff for making that happen!
Located in Bath, England, Netcraft is an Internet monitoring service that measures the response times of forty leading hosting providers’ sites. Every 15 minutes, their devices collect failed requests and connection times to hosting providers’ websites via global locations: England, the United States, Canada, and Romania, just to name a few. The data is then calculated within 24 hours.
Companies are ranked by fewest failed requests to show reliability of routing, resulting in more accuracy than ranking by shortest periods of outage.
For more information about Netcraft, the company rankings, and the ranking process, please visit their website: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2010/07/07/most-reliable-hosting-company-sites-in-june-2010-8.html.
I think so. Many articles and blog posts have been written on compliance and security. Some argue that compliance and security are the same while others argue the opposite. Some people feel that compliance can weaken security.
My take is…
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