BULLETINS

There are 2 main choices here.

You can either host your OTA inhouse. That is in your own office. This is possible as long as you are having a decent server class machine with adequate bandwidth, power backup and most importantly a person qualified and experienced to take care of the system. We have seen that either one of these factors would be missing and due to this the experiment fails. Keep in mind that the system when it is live is exposed to live users and frequent down times could be irritating to users and could be enough reason for them to walk away.

The 2nd option here is to host it in a web farm. In India we now have lot of options with major players providing world class services to you. Notable among them are Reliance, Bharti, VSNL, Net4India, Sify and many others. All of these providers now have the best in breed of infrastructure and has very competitive pricing in place. It would be sensible to check with 3 or 4 providers before you choose one. Most of these companies also give you the option to visit their premises so that you can see their infrastructure. This is indeed a good option and will give you the necessary confidence to hand over your precious server to a 3rd party.

When you think of hosting there is also the option of hosting your portal on a server based in US or Europe. The point to keep in mind here is the hosting services from US or Europe companies are not that costly now and you have a lot of options to start with a lower package and upgrade to a higher one as your portal usage increases. Do some Googling and you will come across many players outside India with attractive offers. Do confirm whether their service is as good as they claim to be. Check out their online support system by asking some questions and see how they respond. Ask for references. This is always a great thing to do -be it with foreign or Indian hosting companies.

There is also the option of the co-location servers where you can keep your server in the web farm and use their infrastructure. This is like taking your server to their site and placing it there and using their power, internet connectivity etc. You only pay for their services and you get the option for taking the service of their Hardware Engineer too.

So as you can see the options are many. The choice will come down to your budgets, estimates on traffic/transactions etc. Read, check around and make a wise decision.