Upgrading an Entrepreneur ASP infrastructure - PART I

Any startup entrepreneurial hosting business usually run into many technical challenges. They face difficult business decisions and often have to trade off between stability, scalability and underlying profit.

There is no win/win situation, however I do know one thing - time is money. In a setup where systems experience frequent downtime, hardware failures or even just frequent visits to the data center for administration can be costly in time to the business.

Here's a case study of a hosting business. Netdreamland is a service provider, providing hosting services for various clients from simple web hosting to sophisticated application services requiring administrative access to the systems. Currently Netdreamland rents half a rack from a remote collocation facility with seven low budget mini tower servers. The systems are assigned individual public IPs as they are fed off of a 3com unmanaged switch directly connected to the ISP. The business owner currently faces a dilemma; he is a one man team who manages the business side and the administration side of the business, He has no time to attend to the systems. Moreover, Netdreamlands systems often fail due to hardware failures, application failures and Denial of Service attacks which renders the system unreachable. This is consuming a lot of his time and energy as he often finds himself driving to the data center for simple reboots to hardware replacements, often in the middle of the night. The collocation is quite a drive away from the office and his last visit to the site was to install a new system for a new customer. He is now afraid to expand his customer base too aggressively as it will increase his visits to the point where he cannot tend other business matters. Netdreamland is profitable but is at a point where further expansion will jeopardize service availability.