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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Hosting Obstacles
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Here's one of the downsides of outsourced hosting that I'm not sure is solveable - if the thing being hosted is critical to your business, who cares about it more: you, or the hosting company? If there's a problem, who will be more highly motivated to fix it? That seems to be the sentiment behind this story from CNet:
In a meeting here with reporters on Friday, Gianforte said reliability and cost issues mean the company isn't interested in managed hosting services, including the $1-per-processor-per-hour Sun Grid.
He tried turning over his servers to a managed hosting company seven years ago, he said, and the move was a "miserable failure" that has since been reversed. Managed hosting companies want control over computers, but RightNow needs to be the boss in order to keep its equipment running around the clock. "We need control to get that kind of reliability," Gianforte said. Nothing has changed in the last seven years to change his mind, he added.
There's also the cost thing:
It doesn't make financial sense, either, Gianforte said. Running his own data center, including engineers and other staff, costs 6 percent of revenue, and he expects that to drop to 4 percent in the next two to three years. One of his top competitors, SAP, pays IBM much more than that to host its software-as-a-service offering, he said.
That certainly sets a target for any outsourcer who wants to get business, now doesn't it?