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Back to basics June 12, 2000 By David Willis 
If you want to build a world-class electronic business, you've got to build a world-class hosting infrastructure. Ignore the basics and you risk a world-class meltdown. It doesn't matter how fresh your content is or how cool your applications are: Botch the fundamentals in the network or the data center--or in operations--and your customers will go elsewhere. Some hard lessons have been learned in public at Britannica.com, eBay.com, PlayStation2.com and VictoriasSecret.com, just to name a few. And for every one of these public embarrassments, there are hundreds of incidents behind the scenes--problems with erroneous transactions, lost customer data or plain old poor performance. For all the effort that has been put into internal infrastructure, it turns out that external-facing systems are an even greater challenge. The stakes are much higher in e-business--and buildouts require at least the same amount of devotion to architecture, technology and product selection as the systems residing inside your firewall do. Incur an outage internally and your users will forgive you; deny service to an external customer and he or she will simply forget you. Effectively sourcing the infrastructure--determining who should do what and where it should occur--is key. Because a majority of what's served up on the Web is pure publishing-oriented content, most installations are best served from an external hosting company's facilities--at least for nontransactional content. Top-tier service providers offer excellent Internet connectivity at a level far beyond what most private organizations can afford. This is the overriding reason to source in the Internet, with 24x7 data-center operations running a close second. Yet for all their strengths, ISPs (as a class) lack essential application-development, -integration and -management capabilities. Many are also weak in the "process and people" parts of the equation--think professional services and project management. As a result, systems integrators offering application services are winning Web hosting contracts, with little customer visibility into the underlying infrastructure. Too many companies have turned over their Web sites to content providers and have no idea what they're buying beyond content and applications. Occasionally a marketing department will venture off on its own and hire an advertising agency to do its hosting with no thought of the infrastructure behind it. Content is essential, but not at the expense of stability. I might hire Martha Stewart to decorate my house, but I wouldn't let her pour the foundation. The shift toward content-first hosting contracts is a dangerous trend. Internet infrastructure is not a commodity, and there are substantial qualitative differences between providers. So though the desire may be strong to find a single, one-stop shop for all your hosting needs, avoid the temptation to treat back-end services as a black box. Award infrastructure contracts separately from application contracts or you could compromise the quality of your online presence. The same is true when evaluating an ASP or extranet service: Take a long, hard look at what's running your outsourcer's operations. I have examined many, and frankly, I'm shocked at the lack of adequate infrastructure in some ASP facilities. The basic Web hosting infrastructure RFP should focus on the provider's Internet peering, the quality of its data-center facilities and services, and its ability to provide consistent, disciplined engineering. The contract may include a number of bundled services--such as hosts, storage, bandwidth, load-balancing and firewall management--but it's essential that you get an itemized list of services and costs. You may know what you need today, but odds are that your needs will soon change, and you don't want to find yourself renegotiating. Once that's settled, then you can worry about the application and content contracts. David Willis is a program director for Meta Group's Global Networking Strategies service. Send your comments on this column to him at david.willis@metagroup.com.
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