How to choose
"We recommend that they look at a company that is financially secure, employs skilled staff and comes across as knowing what they're doing," says Modesto. "Contact with the staff needs to be smooth and professional.
"This might all seem like pretty obvious stuff, but it's still surprising how rarely you find these attributes on hosting and co-location companies."
Modesto thinks the seven most important attributes for a hosting provider are:
- Redundancy: There should never be a single point of failure. Make sure their internal and external network connections, power supplies, backup power systems and all other systems have redundancy--if one ever fails, another should be available to take up the slack.
- Connectivity: Speed of connection to the outside world is an important factor, but a diversity of links to different carriers ensures faster performance for end users no matter which ISP they are using. Australian sites looking to attract local customers must have strong connections to local carriers.
- Network management: Networking staff should have the skills and management tools necessary to handle any problems.
- Availability and escalation procedures: How easy is it to get hold of someone in an emergency? How does the provider contact you if something goes wrong?
- Monitoring: All systems should be proactively monitored on a 24x7 basis. Multiple forms of monitoring and performance metrics are ideal.
- Security: Security procedures, both for physical access to systems and for protection of data, must be solid. Yet they shouldn't be so inflexible that you can't get access to your systems at 3am on a Sunday, if need be.
- Service Level Agreements: While all hosting providers offer SLAs (or if they don't look elsewhere), there are several important issues in drafting an SLA to keep in mind, according to Modesto.
- Clarity: They should be written in plain English, not technical or legal jargon.
- Simplicity: The parameters for measurement and the claim mechanisms should be specified in the SLA, and should be stated as succinctly as possible.
- Fairness: Do the sums, and make sure the conditions under which you can claim result in a reasonable rebate. This should be based on a multiple of total downtime. Pihana Pacific general manager Doug Oates adds that while most SLAs will guarantee five nines availability (the systems are available 99.99999 percent of the time, which equates to about five minutes of downtime per year), the SLA should also set out who measures this availability and how. "Also, do the penalties have any teeth? Is the facility designed so it can realistically provide that service? Just looking at the SLA is one thing, but also at the design and infrastructure behind that."
