First Page of the Article Bruce Morris has been responsible for building some big damn Web server farms. Among them are servers set up in the US and around the world for Gateway 2000 and a wicked SUN cluster in London for Carlton Online. This is part two of a seven-part article. You might want to start at the beginning . If your servers need to be monitored around the clock, by alert, awake engineers however, it will be much cheaper to place your servers where others share that expense.
Engineers can monitor a lot of sites at the same time.
Unless your existing business operations include such mission-critical server monitoring already, you just about have to outsource it. You can pay for a big fat pipe to your office and keep the actual computers running your Web site in a corner or closet somewhere. It feels nice to actually have the equipment where you can see it and fiddle with it if needed. I run into a lot of people advocating hosting their servers in house. They probably won t even admit it to themselves, but I suspect part of their reason for wanting to host in-house is because they like the idea of having a fat pipe into the office so their own surfing speeds will be higher.