A 99% minimum

For those companies whose Web sites merely act as an extension of their marketing efforts, whether or not the site is available 24/7 is not a huge concern. For others, however, uptime is critical, and downtime represents real cash lost.

In a country where telecommunications costs are crippling, power supply is erratic, and essential services are unavailable on a regular basis, ensuring a company's Web site is constantly available is something of a challenge, to say the least.

What sets you apart is your support.

Distinctive

And while most corporates in more developed countries can ensure redundancy by obtaining services from multiple providers, in SA there is only one telecommunications provider, one power utility and one water supplier. That this lack of competition is negatively impacting the country's economy goes without saying. But until such time as things change, hosters and corporates alike have to be relatively creative in their efforts to keep their critical sites up and running.

Says Hetzner SA head, Hans Wencke: "With the onset of broadband in SA, the Internet becomes an increasingly viable option for expanded use in business. And businesses are responding. Hetzner has seen a substantial rise in network traffic over the past two years and [sees] many businesses using our services to interact with their clients, suppliers, branches and staff. We foresee this trend growing in the years to come."

Says Internet Solutions (IS) hosting solutions manager Greg Montjoie: "The key thing, across the entire platform, is to ensure you don't have one single point of failure, from the network connectivity into an environment, at the hardware layer, in the infrastructure, for example, power and cooling, or around any other peripheral services needed."

For the corporate looking to outsource hosting services, Montjoie says: "Ensure uptime by looking at what the data centre is running. Ideally, you want be in a data centre with redundant power feeds to each cabinet. A lot of centres have redundant power feeds, but these are fed off the same distribution board. You need to have redundancy from the Eskom feed, redundant UPSes, generators, redundant distribution boards and feeds so that you have two separate physical power sources into a server."

IS copes with the lack of redundancy options locally by having 40 000 litres of diesel fuel next to the data centre. It runs its generators in redundant pairs, and, says Montjoie: "If the gennies fail we have a back-up by way of 16 tons of UPS batteries in the data centre, which will ensure business continues."

Beyond the technology, however, hosting, like so many industries these days, is all about the people. Says Rackspace UK head, Jacques Greyling: "Our competitors are making it easy [for us to win business]. I think they invest in the wrong things, like infrastructure and servers. Getting the data on is easy; it's the customer experience that counts. They focus on sales whereas we focus on the customer experience. To me, that's the most important thing."

Ensure you don't have one single point of failure.

Plan ahead

Rackspace's philosophy of being fanatical about customer service has paid off, and is reflected in a recent report from Gartner*, which states: "Rackspace is a mid-size independent Web hoster that has evolved from its origins as a provider of low-end hosting to SMBs, to become an extremely strong competitor in enterprise hosting. It distinguishes itself by the high quality of its customer service, which is exceptionally responsive and flexible, regardless of the size of the customer - customers with fewer than six servers, which often have difficulty obtaining sufficient attention from other major Web hosters, should take particular note of this."

"It's important to understand the support side," reiterates Greyling. "Companies are under-investing in support people. The hosting industry believes it is about technology and uptime, and although those are important, they are becoming standard. You must have a great portal for logging issues, but what sets you apart is your support."

As basic Web hosting services become commoditised, providers are expanding offerings in a bid to differentiate themselves.

Says Hetzner's Wencke: "In future, there will be an ever-increasing amount of business applications offered in strategic bundles by hosting providers to service their niche market." These applications are either developed/provided by tertiary vendors under licence, developed in-house by the hosting provider or the customer, or a combination of these.

"Since development is expensive," he adds, "we foresee applications that address the client's needs and are sold on an annuity basis gathering momentum. Economies of scale are important in this business model. This approach also reveals a willingness by both supplier and customer to partake in the risk of successful deployment, ongoing enhancements and, ultimately, achieving sustainability."

This apparent convergence of the Web hosting and managed services markets will provide interesting opportunities, both for the companies quick enough to respond to customer demand, and customers who can leverage economies of scale and drive better pricing/service offerings by using one provider for both service sets. That said, the aforementioned lack of competition in the basic services market will continue to prove challenging for providers that need to differentiate on the basis of outstanding service and uptime.

*Gartner Magic Quadrant for North American Web Hosting, 2006 - 25 August 2006 - Lydia Leong and Ted Chamberlin.