Consider the following scenario: you are going to make a cake for a birthday party, so you go out and buy the flour, eggs, chocolate, and all the other yummy ingredients needed. You have a great mixer at home, so you are thinking this will the best cake ever. But when you get home, you discover that something crucial is missing: the mixing bowl and cake pan. This is similar to having a great website planned with an outstanding CMS to drive it, but when you get to the finish line, you realize you do not have a proper home for your site.
Inadequate Hosting
To take the analogy a bit further, maybe you do have a mixing bowl, but it is way too small, and your ingredients fly all over the place, and in the end, the only one eating any of the cake is your dog Rusty. You did think about the cake, but you didn’t fully explore exactly what was needed to finish making it. You might end up making a fast scramble to the store to buy the bowl and pan, and with the birthday party looming, you may end up paying too much or not having the proper sized bowls and pans.
When spending the time to build the “perfect” CMS driven website, it is never too early to think about the hosting that will be involved. There is much to consider in your project plan. First, you need to make sure you have a good team to help you with planning your hosting. You need to have a list of questions that you will ask yourself so you can choose the best provider and the best hosting configuration.
How Much Hosting Capacity do I Need?
The good news in project planning is that Enterprise CMS hosting is a science, so having the correct numbers will go a long way toward determining the proper housing for your site. I suggest an outline of what will be needed to go with your site on the hosting end. You’ll want to reach out to your hosting partner as soon as the site is being developed to get an idea of what is best for you. At Diagram, we have the benefit of being both a host and a developer, so we have a great knowledge base to help with project planning. The hosting portion and the development portion need to both be integrated in the overall project planning.The proper planning for your hosting should not involve the hosting company just pitching a bunch of servers at you. The planning process should be collaborative and should involve those who are building your site as well as the hosting engineers. There is no way to avoid cost being part of your consideration, but the decision on what you need for hosting should go way beyond that. As a past board member for PMI once stated, "Trying to manage a project without project management is like trying to play a football game without a
game plan"
The planning of your website hosting can be overwhelming, but a professional hosting partner like Diagram will ask you the right questions to get you rolling. We will make sure to find out all the necessary information, such as the size of the site, the size of the database, the software that you will be using, how much traffic the site will be getting, and how much redundancy you want. With more and more hackers and bad guys out there on the web, your hosting project plan has to involve security, which can be complex and overwhelming. The scale of what needs to be considered can be overwhelming, so this process should not be rushed. We will work with you to make sure the hosting project is planned correctly, with key timelines in place.
The Perfect Mix
If your plan goes correctly and smoothly, not only will your chocolate cake be delicious, your hosting will be stress free, and it will help your new or redesigned CMS web site shine. A well coordinated hosting plan will save time and money in the end, offering the certainty that your site is performing well when people are accessing it and the ability to plan for future growth. Please contact us at Diagram if you have any questions about planning a hosting project, or to find out how we can provide you with the best possible hosting experience.
