To host or not to host
I asked this question on Twitter this weekend and received lots of responses, on both sides of the fence:
Debating whether to stick w/ godaddy for hosting district sites vs running our own web servers now that our firewall is fully configured.
Some folks just didn't like my choice of GoDaddy (it wasn't for the commercials - they were cheap, their interface was slick, they had lots of hosting and DNS features and I could go month-to-month). Others were happy to host their own. Why not? It's free and you have your choice of fairly easy technologies to handle web services.
A surprising number encouraged me to stick with outsourced hosting, though. Bandwidth, availability, and hassle were all on the list of reasons to let someone else host our websites. It is mighty easy; just pay the bills and everything happens transparently. I can even add Moodle, Joomla, and other slick functionality with a few clicks. Our district and school websites will probably not start taking too much traffic anytime soon, particularly since our email, SIS, and other services live in the cloud.
As I told one follower on Twitter, though, this seems to be a religious issue. It doesn't quite rival Mac vs. PC, but I'm not really seeing any compelling arguments either way. The geek in me wants to host my own so I can experiment with content management systems and slick open source tools for educators. The busy practical part of me, though, just wants it to work, provocative commercials and all.
What do you think? Host it or outsource it?