Definition

Hosting refers to the practice of outsourcing enterprise applications and/or resources to a third party to be delivered back to the client over a network infrastructure, usually the Internet.

The rise of high-speed networking over the patdecade made it feasible for organizations to provide these services on either a fixed- or flexible-rate basis, alleviating the cost and complexity of maintaining systems and applications in-house.

One view is that many smaller businesses will turn to the hosting model for their IT needs because it  provides a virtually unlimited, scalable architecture that is billed according to use.

Business Applications

Just about any application or function provided by an in-house IT infrastructure can be duplicated by a host. Hosting organizations can deliver processing power and storage for application workloads, as well as  the applications themselves.

Many of the leading organizations offer full suites of business applications, such as databases, Business Intelligence (BI), Customer Relation Management (CRM) and a host of others. Middleware management  stacks and systems analysis platforms are also common.

Deployment Concerns

Chief concerns of the hosting model center largely on the reliability of the provider and the vagaries of the public networks on which most services operate. Service interruptions can shut down business operations at  hundreds of enterprise organizations at a time, leading to lost productivity  and direct revenue loss.

Defenders of the model argue, however, that their services are no more prone to failure than many internal IT infrastructures.

Unlike internal Ethernet-based infrastructures, however, hosted services are generally restricted to the broadband speeds of the Internet, causing many users to complain about high latency.

Technical details

Hosting can be broken down into a number of specific  implementations, such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or even Everything as a Service (EaaS).

Each of these models relies on a range of technologies like virtualization,  high-speed networking, grid and utility computing and others to form as robust a service as possible.