Why companies shouldn't be Hosting just yet

• Wired magazine ran an article on Google's new enormous Datacentres and how they were built. When searching for a site for them, a key consideration was the price of electricity. cheaper electricity was worth Millions of dollars to Google.
  And what do we KNOW about 'getting what you pay for'? We know cheap means that something, however small, has probably been taken away to make it cheaper.
  I'm not talking about Bad Electricity, I'm talking about security, maintenance, choice of partners (Comms line companies, service engineers) and staff training, to name a few. These will all be compromised in the search for greater profits. Lets face it, a company considering hosting is NOT doing it for any other reason than to save money either, what makes them think those higher up the foodchain are working for any other reason? You want to save money so you exchange a little control over your own destiny for filthy lucre, disguised as savings.


• What happens if you don't like the Hosting company you are with? Easy, you just turn up one day with a court order and a van, and you take your servers, routers, firewalls and tape drives away, and you plug them into the socket in the Kitchen at the office....job done.
  Except that's co-locating. You don't own the servers that your company conducts its business on if you go hosted. You don't own the software, or the backup tapes, or the IP addresses. Even if you did have a DR Backup, you'd have to assemble a replacement server and storage setup, and even then, you probably wouldn't have the passwords to restore it.


• So if you want to move hosting companies, you have to do it when they still think you like them, because you are going to need their help, and a lot of it. And its not cheap.
  Large corporations can afford a few grand to have engineers on stand-by and backups ready to be biked from one end of the county to another and Fucking comms companies on stand-by in Mumbai but not in bloody London on a Sunday evening. It's only a teeny-tiny proportion of their annual worth, but to a small company, the same service has to be done during the week, in working hours, because otherwise it's too expensive. And because its during working hours, they lose productivity, and money.
  I bet hosting companies don't talk about THAT in their sales blurb.
  Christ, if we're not careful, we'll see Disaster Recovery companies resurrecting like Pheonix-leeches from the flames, with 'service offerings' including migrating your data from one Hoster to another, (a service which your insurance company will say you you have to have even thought they charge you higher premiums on indemnity and liability policies because you use an outside hoster...Gasp), but which nobody is ever brave enough to use.
  

• with the iPhone came Simplify. Share your music with your mobile device and up to 30 mates can reciprocate. Its slow but very cool


• Songbeat is a neat package of seeqpod and other search engines with nice features such as Last.fm integration


• Finetune.com has been around for a while and is great to use as a clever radio station It limits you to only 3 tracks per playlist from any particular artist, and has some peculiarities, but overall very useful (beejbaby)


• Last.fm is smashing for both recording what you've been listening to, and also for suggesting alternative tracks and artists based on your play history. This is probably the most useful attribute as I love being introduced to new music and I have a fetish for cover versions - for example, have you heard 'our friends electric' as performed by An Pierlé ?! (beejbaby)