It's certainly true that some companies now specializing in e-commerce stand apart from the first commodity-type Web-hosting services. It's also true that when it comes to e-commerce, the biggest, best-known service providers don't necessarily have the skills or services offered by lesser-known specialty providers. If corporations hope to be satisfied with e-commerce outsourcing, they'll need to thoroughly investigate what they're doing--not just reflexively choose the hometown ISP or a current service provider, as so many do today.

Tools of the Electronic Trade
Among the CSPs we surveyed, most served smaller businesses--and plenty of them. Interland says it hosts about 10,000 sites; AnaServe, a Concentric Network company, caters to 2,000.

Across all sites, both large and small, the most typical commerce-hosting configuration taps Unix as the OS and Apache as the Web server. Low-end CGI and Perl predominate as the server application framework, with HTML almost universal on the client. Cisco's PIX and Check Point's FireWall-1 are the most likely firewalls, but we found sites promoting commerce that don't even bother to use firewalls (see "Is the Mine Safe?" on page 70).

We also found Microsoft Windows NT making significant headway among CSPs. Of the 10 CSPs we surveyed predominantly serving medium or large merchants, four use NT exclusively, three use Unix only and three rely on both. Nine of the 10 awarded high marks to both OSes. One leading CSP, for example, values NT as an applications development platform, but finds that Sun's Solaris is much more reliable.

NT: You Love It or You Don't
Overall, 47 percent of survey respondents said they rely on Unix, compared to 32 percent using NT and 18 percent using a combination of the two. One Mac-based hosting provider also responded. Unix scored an overall 7.5 on our 10-point scale measuring overall satisfaction among CSPs using a single OS, slightly ahead of NT at 7.1.

What's most interesting, however, is that the CSPs using NT tended to give it either extremely high or low grades. Matthew Walker, director of sales at CSP Accesspoint Corp., says that while Accesspoint is very happy with NT as a development platform, he says Microsoft is "a little lax with bug fixes, especially on SQL Server." He also doesn't see Microsoft "providing support to customers doing large-scale implementations that require 100 percent reliability." Walker says that if Microsoft offered more hands-on support, even if it cost more, "we wouldn't have to investigate Unix." NT's scalability is another concern for some CSPs.

NT and its bundled Internet Information Server (IIS) were mentioned most often when we asked CSPs what products they had "tried and found wanting." Five CSPs noted problems with NT, and three cited iCat's suite of store-building products. Single mentions were made of iMALL (which runs one of the largest malls on the Internet, and sells services to merchants and hosting providers), Mercantec's SoftCart transaction management products, CyberCash's payment services, ICVerify's credit-authorization software (recently acquired by CyberCash), IBM's Net. Commerce, Bay Network switches, and Microsoft Windows95 and 98.

Commerce providers say Mercantec's pre-SoftCart 4.0 product sends transactions in e-mail and stores them in an unencrypted database--a fairly common, but less than secure, catalog software practice.