Do you host your main site elsewhere?

[depictedminds]

The main reason(s) I've chosen to host my website on a different geographic location to my sales hosts is the following:

1: I am the only client on my service that my website is on. I therefore know the "activity" of said service at all times (within reason)
2: If other websites that I host find themselves on a RBL/Blacklist, my website will not be inadvertantly effected.
(we are not always perfect all the time, so finding these problems might not be as fast as we'd like)
3: Maintaining my "website" (or service) will not effect others hosted within my organisation - this includes updates, feature enhancements, etc.
4: reverse lookups on the IP address of the service will match the name of the website - something I just like to have.

This does add significant overhead to administration however - but for me? Im an admin junky and enjoy being on top of it.

Certainly the uptime element of discussion is very much of an importance too - I would be more inclined to have great uptime across the board - so that was a lesser issue for me. I can still see how that could be a concern however.

 

[ServerSea]

Although, your business web site should be on a different server but it is not mandatory that it should be on a different geographical location. Should be in a same network if its speed is very good.

In my opinion, there is no special benefit to host your business on a different location than your servers for clients.

 

[depictedminds]

Although, your business web site should be on a different server but it is not mandatory that it should be on a different geographical location. Should be in a same network if its speed is very good.

In my opinion, there is no special benefit to host your business on a different location than your servers for clients.

Fair statement. Different geographical location is not mandatory. I would argue that the benefits of hosting the company main site geographically different could have perceived benefits, but not necessarily mandatory benefits as you have said.

 

[hostavps]

Never host your company's website on the same server you host your clients, always keep them separate. Where you host it really doesn't matter as long as it's a reliable and stable provider. This could be your own company or another company.

I totally agree with hostleet. It would be safer to host the two items on two separate servers.

 

[Forward Web]

Do you host your main website on other companies servers? From what I can tell it's not a bad idea incase your own servers go down and you can't be contacted. We've still got alternate means (e.g: Twitter, which we heavily advertise in our emails) however it's nice being able to use the main website.

Do you? And if so, who are you with- (we're about to go with HostRelic due to their low storage, low price & 99.989 uptime report last year)

I think hosting your main website away (in a different data center) from the servers (datacenters) that you host your actual customers on can be deceptive. Personally I think its best to host your main website in the same datacenter as the other websites you are hosting.

 

[GreenOliveTree]

I think if you consider your web site where your clients are getting support and where they have opportunity to check the news and updates that should be on the dedicated server. Client sites might be attacked and as result you may get your site hacked or damaged.

 

[HostOX]

Yes, yes, yes and yes again, never, EVER host it on the same server, forget the downtime.

How about hacking? Those little morons who like to use scripts have done it to tons of people, mind you, they should learn to secure a server to help it.

But yes, it is key, we currently have one main corporate server, and another corporate node with nagios for monitoring.

Our main corporate network consists off two off site mail servers, two off site DNS servers, one main server for the websites and SQL, and one for the monitoring.

We have a rather advanced setup, however the uptime is great and it all powers smoothly, not to forget, even if the main sites go down, our mail servers are still up for clients to email us, then still, if the first mail server goes down, the second comes into play.

I find it kinda fun really lol, it is like the undefeatable game mwahaha, it is not just good for reputation and support and a professional image, it can be fun!

 

[ServerSea]

Your main site should be on a different dedicated server, however on a completely different location is not necessary at all.

 

[ashwin246]

Hosting main website on other company servers affects the credibility of the company servers.

 

[DJAB Hosting]

We do. We used to just have our website as its own VPS, but on our VPS server - one time it went out briefly, and we didn't have a point of contact (although we did have our off-site e-mail through Rackspace, so it wasn't too bad) - so now we host it on a completely different box, independent of our customers accounts.

 

[stjohns2004]

Always Host your Website on a seperate server, It is beter for you and your clients, especially if your server were to go down your clients could get ahold of you.

 

[ServerSea]

I do not agree with the down concept.
"If you are not capable to maintain good up time on your client's server, then you will must have problems with the server where you host your business site."

You should have a dedicated server for your business site just because it may use maximum resources and you may not face issues when your visitor numbers will exceed. A hosting site should have complete billing and support system which will work perfectly on dedicated resources.

 

[Ci-Theo]

I completely concur with the majority view in this thread; always host the main site and backups elsewhere.

Putting all your eggs in one basket is a stupid idea. The last thing you want is a network outage and not being able to tell clients even where your Twitter or status page is because your site is hosted on the same network!

 

[Pete_Coreix]

If you are so concerned about website availability and don't want to face any downtime, then I think you should also consider load balanced dedicated servers. Means, if one server is out of service, then the whole system will still work. The load balancer will recognize the failed node, and mark the crashed system. The total performance of the load balancing cluster will be reduced, but services will still be provided.

Normally it is called as a server mirroring & it's a process of channeling data from the Master server to the Slave server so that an identical copy of data exists on the Slave server. In other words server mirroring can also be described as utilizing a backup server that duplicates all the data of the master server. After the implementation of mirroring, if for any reason, the master server fails, the slave server can immediately take its place without any downtime.

This is the best way. SMEs who do this and some can slightly increased the redundancy factor by getting a circuit onto a layer 2 at DC 2, and then host masters at DC 1 and the fail-overs at DC 3. It's workable of you haver the budget and a DC service provider that has POP at 3 x DC and Layer 2 cross-connect between all three.

 

[aodat2]

I'm not here to suggest crazy things but to tell you the truth, I've seen before an entire DC have an outage before. So if the truth is that you're hosting the server on the same DC as your customers, then what would have happened if the DC had a routing problem or etc? Would your site still be accessible to others?

There are good and bad to having it on different locations so please DO NOT put off having it on different location as something is negligible. Considering the fact that I'm in Malaysia and our ISP is basically the biggest provider here, I've had my fair share of server being out of reach from the world and even myself because of routing problems, DDOS and etc.

At least if your site is hosted elsewhere, you will have a backup solution when that happens. There's no need to put your site out of commission when the DC has something going on.

 

[veoloo]

It does make sense for the reason to let clients contact you, but I think that suggests that downtime happens too often.

If you need to host it elsewhere, you need to fix your downtime issues. Why not start clustering your servers to make it better for you and the clients rather than just your site?

 

[handsonhosting]

Hi Veoloo,
There are times when an outage can be from an outside soruce and not the fault of the webmaster or the datacenter. There have been several incidents in recent history for everything from flooding, powerlines cut, backup generators failing, datacenters being shut down due to electrical fires, trucks running into buildings and everythign in between that is outside of the NORMAL scope of a functional datacenter.

In those cases, would you rather your users be in the dark on the issue, or would you rather have your site available through an alternate location so you can still communicate with visitors? Hopefully you've looked at keeping a communication channel outside of your website for incidents like the above.

 

[ultimatewebhost]

It's always to host your main website on another server where you don't host your clients as in case if your server crashes goes down people will still be able to contact you and vice versa.