Hybrid Hosting
My previous post has prompted me to drop this post in from the new Cleartext Systems web site, which isn’t live yet. (will be by the end of the week).
We’ve (Cleartext via Cool Bananas) been a NetRegistry reseller for many years and recently started using Media Temple in the USA for customers asking for virtual servers. Recently customers have been asking about offshore hosting.
When should I use Australian hosting?
Australian hosting is fine for most companies hosting requirements, if you’re a typical Australian small to medium business then any of the myriad of hosting companies can provide enough storage and data at a reasonable cost. We recommend NetRegistry because they are reliable and provide excellent customer support even if their plans aren’t the cheapest.
Why use offshore hosting?
If you’ve been watching the news you may have realised that Australia is ‘broadband challenged’, the cost of internet connections and the amount of data (stuff you can download) is far more (and far less respectively) than you can get from US based hosting companies.
This becomes an issue when you want to deliver rich media content like audio and video via your web site or web based application. Most Australian based hosting plans just don’t offer enough disk space and data transfer at reasonable price points. This is when you should consider US based hosting.
What is hybrid hosting?
We’ve coined a new phrase, “Hybrid Hosting”, this is a hosting setup where your main web hosting is based in Australia, probably because your primary audience is in Australia, but rich media hosting is offshore, typically in the USA.
This setup has several advantages;
- It keeps your web site ‘local’ and always available in the event that Australia suffers a ‘disconnect’ from the rest of the world. This is rare, but has happened.
- It keeps costs down by allowing you to select a hosting plan from an Australian provider for your web pages and then store your rich media content on a comparatively cheaper host with lots of space and data in the USA.
- Any outage in international connectivity only effects your rich media (audio and video) not the main web site pages.
This approach produces some interesting options for organisations moving into Web 2.0 with all the things that entails, RSS, Podcasts, streaming video and audio.If you’d like to discuss hosting then please give us a call with your web site requirements and we’ll work out a reasonably priced, reliable hosting solution for you.
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Good Layout and design. I like your blog. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. .
Jason Rakowski