Businesses operating in a defined geolocation, giving services to defined customers, located in the same region. May had thought about hosting their Website on premise.
What it takes to host website on premise?
At first, we need to define business types. Defining the difference between small business from well established business.
Small business
Small business tend to rely on digital online platform to have a presence on the internet. These platforms offer also a marketing tips, in order to help them grow their businesses.
Digital presence on the internet can be made through a digital platform paying a monthly subscription or using one of the open source Content Management System (CMS).
It is always about cost of operation. But, what about limitation and long term growth.
Having a business presence on the internet using a digital platform is simple, fast and not expensive. But, what are the platform limitations ? The nature of it ? These digital online platforms are closed source code. So at certain level of business growth, these platform do not fit the business need.
So, Content Management System will be the solution. CMS Plugins allow businesses to extend their functionalities to whatever their users needs.
Plugins come with the basic free version and the pro version which is not free.
CMS ecosystem is great model. CMS can be extended by installing plugins. The ecosystem motivates the developers to add extended functionalities. Which some of them are free and the others are not.
At a certain point small businesses will be using a CMS with extended functionalities. In that case, small businesses have the ability to write their own plugin by paying a freelance developer to do it. but, hosting will be the next challenge.
Well established business
Well established business rely on their IT professionals, from managing content to digital transformation, marketing and hosting. These types of business tend to host their application developed by their employee in the cloud.
Paying for computing power as needed and scalability attract businesses to use the cloud. Investing in hardware depend of the business budget and may not be a good decision.
Investing in hardware to run website on premise
Hardware is an asset. Business with budget can opt in to on premise hosting. Cloud software Like OpenStack simplify the process of hosting and running virtual machines.
OpenStack is The Most Widely Deployed Open Source Cloud Software in the World.
On top of these virtual machines, docker simplify the process of running containerized applications.
Bandwidth and open ports allowance is provided by the Internet Service Provider for commercial use. Internet Service provider block port 80, 25 for non-commercial identity. Port 443 is always open.
On premise or cloud hosting, it depends. Cost of operation, play a major factor. Evaluation, must be made along the growing curve of business in order to make a precise decision.