I am trying desperately to get the first pieces of our NetCommunity implementation taken care of. We are hung up on the hosting for the BBNC server - do we go with a hosting company or go with Blackbaud? I'm wondering what other people have done and why. I am the sole techie in a 12-person office. I'm not trained in web development at all, so very few of the things in the technical requirements document make sense. I just happen to be pretty good with computers and software, which is how I ended up in this position. I'm inclined to go with Blackbaud, but it is relatively expensive, and I need to justify the need. I really appreciate any thoughts! Thanks!

Karen, My recommendation is that you keep the BBNC web server as close to the RE databse server as possible. I know one school that had BBNC hosted away from their RE Database and ended up bringing it back on the same network with RE. Tm

Really? That makes me nervous, because I don't think we're prepared to host our own BBNC server. Was it just a speed issue? Pages took a long time to load? Karen

Hi Karen - it sounds like we're in similar positions in similar offices. We plan to implement NetCommunity within a couple months. The recommendation for us was to host with BB for better security. I can't remember if that came from BB or one of our outside consultants.

We too are in the middle of the hosting question. Although our budget doesn't give us much of a choice right now. BB hosting is $3k/year and a new server is 3x that! Ouch. Curious to see how others have done it.

We moved away from BB because of speed issues with accessing the RE database locally. We are now hosting the site internally. Another benefit is you have control of your web site and can put any other additonal pages on the site that don't use NetCommuity. BB will not let you put any files on their servers Steve [i]--- Edited at 1/3/2007 11:00:04 AM by Steve Spry[/i] [i]--- Edited at 1/3/2007 11:02:01 AM by Steve Spry[/i]

We have our BBNC hosted by Blackbaud, and have had no issues with access time. We have our own, separate web site hosted locally, with a link to the BBNC site for donations. Like you, I have no IT department and I am not an experienced web developer,so having Blackbaud host the site significantly reduced the amount of technical information I needed to grasp. However, if the BBNC site is hosted by Blackbaud, you still have to also have a local machine (or part of a local machine)set up as a netcommunity web server, to act as the go-between for RE and BBNC. I am happy with their hosting services, and I beleive in cases like ours, where we are a "1 person IT dept.", it makes more sense for your organization when it comes to succession planning. Harriet Farmer Database Support Ottawa Humane Society

Steve, I've heard some horror stories about hosting your own site. Do you have a dedicated IT person?

I know this is an old posting, but we are preparing to go live and I am still struggling with the hosting issue. For those that host internally, did you need to purchase super-size servers? I know users won't bombard our website, but I am more than a little nervous about bandwidth, speed, etc. Any help is appreciated...

Nora, I started out using the same web server and SQL server that I was using for our old web site. I ended up putting BBNC web on a separate web server with 2 2 gig processors and 2 gigs of RAM. I put the BBNC SQL database on a dedicated servr with 4 2gig processors and 4gigs of RAM. It is much quicker, more reliable, and seems to smile a lot more now. Tom

We are running BBNC with a two server setup as well. Both the web server and SQL database server have 2 Intel Xeon 3GHz processors and 2 GB of RAM.