Arms IT professionals with a complete blueprint for developing successful Web hosting strategies Written by a consultant who helped develop the Web hosting strategies at many of today's top e-commerce vendors, this book fills in IT professionals on the full range of services available. The book provides decision-makers with criteria checklists and other useful tools they need for determining what they need, why they need it, how to find it, and how to evaluate and manage it.

Doug Kaye provides a clear, complete roadmap for building an effective Web hosting strategy, and offers practical advice and answers to critical questions. The book covers important topics, including the real cost of bandwidth, domain name services, shared versus dedicated servers, backup and recovery, service-level agreements, security, negotiating with and managing vendors, and hardware maintenance and support. Companion Web site includes links to Web hosting directories, tools for evaluating hosting services, and online articles and white papers.

This isn’t one of the hundreds of books that will help you write HTML or use Photoshop to design a killer web site. Those are the easy parts. I wrote this book to help you plan for the unglamorous on-going operation and hosting of your site. Specifically, this book explains how to select a web-hosting service or MSP and how to manage that relationship once your site is up and running.

Once you decide to outsource your web operations, your choice of a web-hosting service or MSP can have a substantial impact on the reliability, performance, and accessibility of your web site. In other words, selecting a web-hosting service or MSP is risky because the cost of making a wrong decision can be substantial. I want to help you avoid mistakes.

Parts one and two (~70 pages) cover the basics, exploring shared and dedicated web hosting, colocation and managed services in depth. Part three (~100 pages) investigates strategic issues such as loss of control, lock-in and finding a vendor’s sweet spot. I’ve dedicated full chapters to risk management, SLAs, and developing traffic and server scalability models.

(The spreadsheets are available on line.) In parts four and five (~200 pages) I focus on technology with chapters on web-site architectures, caching and CDNs, connectivity, storage, backup and recovery, security, monitoring and DNS. I’ve also included a chapter entitled “The Net Detective Toolkit” that will help you research prospective web-hosting services and track down problems when they occur.