Outsourced Web Hosting Pros & Cons
Outsourcing is quite populary in IT industry based the huge requirements. You can outsource most stuff to thrid party company and only remain the core part to be handled by your own for highest efficiency. The same to web hosting, in order to save budget and simplify the management, more and more hosting providers try to outsource their support to another company. Can we trust such hosting service? What would be the pros and cons by doing so?
For a recent survey for IT industry, the outsource service increased 80% in the last year and has kept fast growth rate. When referring to outsourcing, the service can vary a lot based the exact products you're selling. For web hosting, mostly it's about helpdesk outsourcing. Following is a list of pros and cons of the service by comparing to traditional solutions.
Pros of outsourcing
The biggest advantage to hosting company is they can concentrate on products promotion without worring the rest support because everything will be handled by another company. Fully advantages can be detailed in follow categories.
- Time saving. Compring to old times when company staffs have to work around the clock, now they just need to clock in during regular business time and they can focus on something in terminal end without answering customer calls. You can finish work by half time under comfortable environment.
- More professional. There're lots of third party support groups who have lots of IT genius in various fields. With a properly formed support system, each customer request can be assigned to the proper support technician for fast solutions. On the other hand, if you manage everything by yourself, you may not do it so efficiently because you may encounter some problems never met before.
- Less costs. Why you have to operate 24*7? Because you have lots of work to do like server monitoring, staff training, answering customer calls and every single job in your daily tasks. It's big investment for hosting business but obviously you can reduce the cost by outsourcing some works. There's big competition among support groups so you can pick up a best provider by good price.
As we see, outsourcing could bring lots of benefits to your hosting business. Especially when you're running a big hosting company, it will simply make your business more professional and efficient.
Cons of outsourcing
Outsourcing to third party group means you have to allow their access to your system, either web based or physical server system, they must get sufficient permission in order to complete the task. You have to consider the following if you need to outsource your service.
- Security Protection. The biggest concern to ensure your business health. Once the third party company staff logged into your system, you must have good policy to monitor their actions. Any change in server end and customer accounts must be approved on your end first or else you're in high risk to be hacked in near future. You must configure strong protection and backup system for urgent recovery.
- Privacy Protection. All your clients' privacy will be exposed to third party support, means they can save all your customer information to local and you have no way to know of. As long as your clients privacy being abused somewhere you're in big trouble and probably be sued by law.
Because of above high risk points, you must find a reputable and reliable support company to work with. Such company will sign legal paper with you in various sides to protect your business in safe place. They also have good plans for staff training and security protection. You have to research a bit for those service just like the same way you evaluate a hosting plan because you're going to put your business there.
Many hosting companies are outsourcing nowadays. endurance – one of the biggest hosting group on the planet is also doing outsourcing for multiple brands. They keep acquiring available business but obviously they can't purchase over all support staffs. Instead, they outsource a lot because of their own limited support people. It's not bad choice as long as they can balance the above points.
