Hosting Services are Not all
Created Equal
Hosting services are not all
created equally because
application and service
requirements are not the same.
Small and medium sized
businesses are not Fortune 500
companies and neither are their
requirements from IT systems.
At I-BN we designed our service
to meet the needs of companies
that are between $5 and $250
million with an infrastructure
that can scale from the smaller
client to the mid-market
requirements; designed for high
availability and sized for the
systems we are certified to
service and host. Our
services are delivered with the
personal touch of an IT partner
that is responsive to your
individual business needs.
Types of Hosting
Managed
Hosting -
Generally
refers to a service where the
provider offers more services
around the hosted equipment.
I-BN offers components of
managed hosting as we are
responsible for all aspects of
the servers in the hosted
environment. This includes
server operating system
maintenance, backup services,
firewall, anti-virus, etc.
Our hosting service includes
more than the typical managed
hosting service in that it
includes the actual licenses for
all those components as well as
database licenses. The
components selected have been
tested to work with the specific
ERP and CRM applications we host
to ensure your system is
operational and stable within 3
days of receiving the service
order.
Some
providers define managed hosting
service to include ownership of
the
data
center;
however; no company
offering comprehensive services
designed for the SMB market owns
a world class data center.
Those companies that started
with the focus of comprehensive
hosting services for the mid
market with a data center either
were acquired by other companies
or went out of business.
Companies offering managed
hosting services that own their
own data centers are not
certified in the applications
they are hosting like I-BN.
Server consoles, chat
sessions with technicians and
automated attendants provided by
mega-hosters can not compete
with a trained professional
certified in both the
infrastructure technology and
the applications your business
relies upon for its operation.
Cloud
Computing - The cloud is a
type of architecture that allows
computing services to be
consumed as a resource over the
internet. There are
private clouds that are
restricted to specific customers
or public clouds that are sold
as a service. These
environments generally are
characterized by the ability to
add or remove resources like
CPU, memory and storage on
demand. I-BN offers a
semi-private cloud with pools of
servers (for CPU and memory),
storage arrays and shared
services for backup and firewall
based on the Citrix Xen
platform. Our private
cloud platform
went live in Q2 of 2008 and is
being constantly improved.
This environment has provided
the highest level of
availability and redundancy as
physical server hardware issues
result in redirection of
resources rather than
replacement of parts.
Public clouds offered by
mega-hosters can provide billing
for services by the hour or
fractional time periods, but
your applications are not
licensed that way. SME
companies need scalable
architectures to grow with their
business with billing mechanisms
that match the license models of
Microsoft and other software
application companies.
Other
Types of Hosting - I-BN
has standardized on a model
of managed services to provide a
99+% of reliabilitiy and uptime
since our inception in 1999.
I-BN does not offer co-location
services where your servers are
located in our data center
because we can not keep a stock
of hot swapable parts from
servers not meeting our exacting
standards. Our service is
not predicated on providing a
physical server to meet your
specifications, but a virtual
server from a pool of identical
servers that are upgraded or
replaced on a scheduled
maintenance cycle. In this
manner we provide our service
with no long term contracts.
