Infrastructure hosting describes an arrangement where some or all of the hardware and software - the infrastructure - needed to provide a service is located away from the customers own premises. An everyday example of this is a telephone landline, where only the telephone itself is located with the customer and the rest of the infrastructure is owned and managed at a remote location - the telephone exchange - by the phone company.

We are able to taylor Infrastrucure Hosting to meet your requirements, which can take a number of different forms:

• Application Specific
• Co-location
• Managed
• Fully Outsourced

These differences in each of these services is described below...

A good example of Application Specific Hosting and one that you probably use is website hosting. The specific application being provided is the webserver software onto which you are able to upload your website. The service provider takes responsibility for ensuring that the webserver application runs correctly and is available from the internet. The customer is responsible for the content of the application, in this case the website content: html pages, images, etc. Email is another service that is often provided as a hosted application.

Application hosting costs range widely from inexpensive commodity services such as basic websites and email to high cost specialist solutions such as CRM and ERP applications.

With Co-location Hosting, customer owned servers are located in the service provider's datacentre - often referred to as 'rackspace'. The service provider is responsible for providing utilities such as power, air conditioning, fire suppression and connectivity to the internet. The customer owns the hardware and software and is responsible for all management and maintenance of the server hardware, operating systems, applications and business processes.

Co-location cost are typically split into 2 components, physical space - usually measured in units (U) of rackspace, and the bandwidth of the data connection to the internet. Costs start at a few hundred pounds per year for a small (1U) server.

Under a Managed Hosting agreement, the service provider typically provides the data centre, network, servers, operating system and possibly core applications such as email and databases. The service provider is responsible for ensuring availability and stability of these components. The customer manages the applications and performs user administration tasks such as account creation, access control, password changes and other business related process.

Costs start at around £50 a month for a small 'dedicated server' .

With Fully Outsourced Hosting the service provider typically owns all the infrastructure including hardware, software, maintains and manages it including all end-user support. The customer pays a rental fee which may be based on the number of users or the amount of usage.

Costs depend on the mix of services being provided.