Based on Doug Kaye’s classic book titled "Strategies for Web Hosting and Managed Services," following key points are intended to create user interest in effectively managing relationship with their MSPs and hosting service providers.

Working With Hosting Service Vendors

• Select a package that exactly meets your your balance of capabilities and capacities.

• Starting with shared-server hosting, make sure that your vendor distributes system resources fairly among all sites. It is always favorable to know how you vendor monitors shared-server CPU load, network throughput, and server-response time.

• Always prefer a dedicated server if you are technically sophisticated or if you intend to store confidential data about your business and its operations.

• Select a colocation vendor whose facility is close to your staff in order to ease your server installation, configuration and maintenance activities.

• It is always important to ask prospective vendors if they have multiple points of entry (POEs) for all services or whether they connect externally to separate facilities.

• Understand your application requirements before searching and signing up with an MSP.

• Look for MSPs with a team-staffing model, which is a better way for managing most Web sites than the dedicated, fully-distributed, or TAM models.

Management Strategies

• In an effort to avoid lock-ins and reduce switching costs, always develop an exit strategy -- plan for switching vendors if necessary.

• Make sure that you evaluate each of the service components independently in terms of quality and delivered value.

• Require vendors to refund or credit up to 100% of their fees in case their service levels are missed.

• Favor the renting option if your vendor provides 24X7 on-site maintenance staff and spares or if you think upgrades will happen frequently.

• Ask the vendor for the average actual uptime percentage achieved by its customers in the past year. Base these figures in your risk analysis.

Technology Management

• Do not spend unnecessary by applying redundancy at both the component level and across multiple servers within the same architectural tier.

• An architecture is fully redundant only if it includes redundant switches, load balances, and links to your Web-hosting service's routers.

• For Web-sites with low to middle traffic volume, employ CDNs using the centralized model (with 4-30 edge servers). For high-volume sites, use CDNs based on distributed model.

• Always evaluate your vendor's connectivity by its capacity/load ratio.

• Use DAS (direct attached storage) for storage of static content and smaller databases -- less than 200 GB. Use NAS (network attached storage) for data between 200 GB to 10 TB and for need to access a single file system from both Unix and Windows operating system. Employ SAN-based storage for database servers and clusters if you require a significant volume of write/update operations with maximum performance and reliability.

• Always backup your data with magnetic disk as an intermediate storage between your live site and your Web-hosting vendor's tape archiving system.

• Install a firewall between your Web servers and your application servers in three-tier architecture.

• Place the network-based intrusion detection system in front of your application servers rather than in front of your entire Web site.

• Always use a third-party credit card processing service to store your customer's credit card numbers. Never house credit card numbers in you Web site database.

Tools Management

• Analyze your prospective vendor's traffic and outage reports.

• Contract for external monitoring in order to track your Web site and your Web hosting vendor's responsibilities.

• Use at least two public DNS name servers. Let your Web hosting service or MSP operate one of it, preferably on the same network as your Web site. The other should be on the separate networks to be operated by the other vendor entity.

• Do not register or transfer a domain with an entity that is not accredited by the ICANN.