server hosting

How to Outsource Hosting

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For many businesses, hosting the company website and/or data storage in-house is the best option, both financially and logistically. But then, things begin to change. The business grows, new services are added, budgets are reprioritized or staffing changes are made. Or, in a worst case scenario, the business falls victim to a disaster or cyberattack, and determines that it’s time for a more secure hosting setup. Whatever the reason, when it becomes time to outsource hosting, it’s helpful to know the steps.

Step One: Get The Information

Before deciding whether to outsource hosting, you should first get in touch with a reliable hybrid IT company. At Vaultas, we’re happy to talk businesses through our hosting solutions, and to help determine what exactly they need.

Step Two: Determine What You Have and What You Need

What and how much you choose to host will depend on:

  • the company’s personnel resources,
  • budgetary allocations, and
  • the type of business you conduct.

Step Three: Start Making Decisions

Whether you maintain some hosting in-house will depend on having the right personnel and your specific business needs. One option is to choose an IaaS, or Infrastructure-as-a-Service, provider to manage select hosting needs, while managing others in-house. This allows companies to save money while outsourcing some of the more complicated aspects.

(If a company does business in healthcare, banking, insurance or financial services, there are federal regulations on security and compliance that can make it more difficult to manage in-house.)

For companies without the personnel or IT resources to manage any part of the infrastructure, fully managed hosting services may be the way to go. This could be a more costly option, but it allows for smoother day-to-day operations, and decreased risk.

 

 

 

Vaultas offers a wide variety of hosting options, including website, application and storage hosting solutions. If your business needs a more custom solution, we can tailor any of our services to meet your needs, providing nonstop, comprehensive support to ensure that there are no interruptions.

Could outsourced hosting save your company time and money?

Contact Vaultas to learn more about our custom hosting solutions.

Vaultas is a premier provider of hybrid IT solutions, providing data storage and backup, disaster recovery and business continuity services, hosting, colocation, cloud storage, data center consulting, internet connections, hosted PBX and VOIP, and more. Our data centers are located in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Alexandria and St. Cloud, MN, and Milwaukee, WI. Contact us to get started.

(This is a repost of a blog post from October 2017 that was updated in March 2020.)

The Benefits of Server Hosting

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As companies continue to transition more of their data and operations to digital platforms, the need for a sufficient and secure hosting service becomes even greater. Depending on a company’s size and resources, it often makes more sense to enlist a server hosting service, like Vaultas, to maintain and oversee the company’s physical hosting.

But what are the benefits of using a hosting service?

First, a refresher: server hosting is the offsite management and maintenance of a company’s hardware hosting resources – the physical and virtual servers on which data is stored. Read our previous blog post to learn more about the different variations of server hosting.

There are many benefits of server hosting. When physical hosting services are outsourced, so are the financial and personnel resources involved in maintaining a server onsite. This can result in significant savings – both in time and money – and is especially beneficial for smaller companies who can’t afford a dedicated IT staff.

In addition, server hosting usually significantly increases a company’s protection against disasters, ransomware, and other security threats. Hosting services protect their clients’ data with firewalls, backups and physical security measures, protecting it against whatever threat might occur.

Finally, if your company seeks to host an application or website, there may be special skills required to support those platforms. An experienced physical hosting service will have the necessary knowledge, saving the company the effort and cost of having to hire or train someone skilled in that area. At Vaultas, we engage a network of vendor partners to support most applications, and our data center environments allow us to offer customers the reliability necessary to support the applications that are critical to business continuity.

Ready to switch to a hosting service for your data, website or applications? Learn more about Vaultas’ dedicated hosting service, then get in touch to receive a custom quote from our experienced hybrid IT professionals.

What is Server Hosting?

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When you hear the word “hosting,” what comes to mind? For many, hosting is synonymous with web hosting, which is providing a platform for a website or application. This is an important type of hosting, yes – but it’s not the only one. At Vaultas, we provide not only web hosting, but also server hosting, which is the offsite management of a company’s physical or virtual data and digital operations.

There are several different types of server hosting, which we’ll detail below.

Managed physical server:

The customer either provides the server or leases the server for use onsite. The hosting service installs the server and provides maintenance and monitoring, but the customer has control over the operating system, hardware and software. This can be an expensive option because the server requires both onsite management and offsite monitoring.

Dedicated server:

This is similar to a managed server, but the hosting service owns and maintains the server offsite. Customers have fewer choices for operating systems, but less hands-on management is required. It’s in the hosting service’s best financial interest to provide high-quality maintenance to increase reliability and life cycle duration.

Virtual private server:

VPS provides the same benefits as dedicated servers, but involves the coupling of a robust group of servers to host in a virtual environment. This creates a “high availability” server for high-demand environments and applications, often with a lower cost to the customer.

 

There are variations within each of these server groups, and each can be customized to fit the unique needs of your business. With a wide network of partners and 24/7 support, hosting with Vaultas ensures that there will never be any interruptions in your hosting.

To learn more about hosting, cloud storage, data storage or any of our other hybrid IT solutions, visit our website and get in touch for more information and a free quote.