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Businesses may opt for a fully managed e-commerce site for a variety of reasons. But the need for speed to market often heads the list. By Christine Hudgins
Outsourcing virtually eliminates the long ramp-up otherwise needed to evaluate and buy equipment, and bring on operational staffing. So when we decided to evaluate fully managed hosting services, we took many of the basics of good hosting we had evaluated in our collocation feature (see page 46), and added an emphasis on factors such as speedy provisioning. We also took a much closer look at the practices surrounding hardware, OS and software maintenance, as well as the emphasis The Great Eight put on key commerce applications, databases, services and partnerships.
Different spin, similar results: Sprint augmented its top spot as a collocation host with the leading position in managed-hosting services; Digex placed a close second. Uunet was third, followed by GTEI-in part because of GTEI's unwillingness to answer inquiries about pricing. Exodus is primarily a collocation provider, so we didn't evaluate its services in this category.
A Sprint To Bring Business Online
Sprint may be a latecomer to managed hosting, but it knows how to hustle. It says it can bring a small ready-to-host server installation online in about 15 days, while a similarly situated enterprise might take about 15 to 30 days. Only Digex, which claims seven days is typical for a small customer, offers to do things much faster. Uunet comes in at a speedy 14 to 21 days for a typical mid-sized installation. GTEI says it can bring on a single server in seven business days from the time equipment arrives in the data center. A large installation of eight to 10 servers might take 20 days.
Another key managed-service differentiator can be found in what the name implies-the actual management of hardware, OS and applications for a customer. Sprint takes a locked-down approach to this task, segregating managedhosting servers in sections of two data centers, where an escorted data-center tour is about the closest customers come to their machines. Sprint, however, lets customers refuse a system patch that isn't critical to securitysomething GTEI and Uunet don't allow for their fully managed systems, though customers can request deferrals. Sprint pretests all server changes,...