Most pundits will say how inherently global and transparent the Internet is, allowing a server with a public IP address to be accessed from anywhere. While public-facing servers do have broad accessibility there are a number of dirty secrets that the sales staff at your favorite server provider fails to mention.

So with so many moving parts to consider when getting services what should you look out for? Here are a few crucial things to keep in mind:

Global Routing
While many lay claim to how global the Internet is, those of us that operate backend systems know that there are plenty of caveats. The reachability of your server, and subsequently your services, is dependent upon how many peers your upstream provider has, and in turn, how many peers their peers have. As an example, in my area of the globe a company called Comcast provides residential broadband services. While I have one of our datacenters no more then 15 miles away, the best way to get a fast connection between my house and our local DC’s servers is to do some research and find out who Comcast peers with. It turns out that a nasty little secret is that, at least in my area, Comcast’s backbone is really Cogent, so we have a Cogent line coming into out local DC. By doing this the connection from my house to our local DC never leaves Cogent’s network, except for the edge equipment. Now there are always exceptions: if a link goes down for example the network gear will route around the failure, which may take my connection half-way across the country, but the primary route will typically be the shortest and least-expensive.

Business-Centric Infrastructure
Similar to many industries there are retail(consumer) and business(commercial) facets to the hosting industry, and as such providers tailor their services toward a particular audience. For businesses it’s important to find a provider that is aware of the requirements a business demands such as redundant components, high-performance network, reliable support contacts and value-added services. Today, more so then even 12 months ago, reliable power(main and backups) is high on the list of features to examine. It doesn’t hurt if a provider has current or previous experience in your industry either.

Managed Services
Perhaps the most import type of hosting for small and large businesses alike includes various forms of management, which indicates there are resources on-staff that are experts in a particular technology. There are a few handfuls of reliable hosting providers that can, for example, provision and host your server, manage the network and manage the software on your server. Most times the end-users of your server(i.e. your clients, your team, your internal users) are still your responsibility, but things like OS, network and backup configurations are handled by your service provider. The allure of managed services are two-fold: time savings for you and your team due to not worrying about the server and cost savings through having access to experts nearly immediately if issues ever arise.