We are just starting alpha-test with our new product and, unfortunately, it is time for us to make our final hardware and hosting decisions.  And I always seem to end up with the crappy jobs - it's the penalty you get for being in charge, I guess.

I say unfortunately because I *hate* choosing hosting like I hate buying a car.  (Well, the cars I have to buy, anyway.  I'm sure I'd enjoy buying a 512bbi.  Minivan, not so much.)

I spent approximately 5 hours on the phone yesterday with sales guys talking about bandwidth, upgradeability, reliability, setup fees (WTF?), etc, etc. And today I'm sure I'll get five quotes, four of which will be substantially wrong and require at least one more phone call back to Sleazy Al the Bandwidth Guy of Peoria.

Every week my partner and I meet to go over the dailies on our main business.  I like to complain, so I was grousing to him about the whole hosting thing. He reminded me of the bad-old-days (2001?) when you had to have a guy on staff, buy your own sunboxes, and ship them to someplace with a cage, etc, etc.  I cheered up, because renting a couple of servers at RackSpace or Cari.net is a LOT easier than hiring, buying, etc.

But then I started looking at all the things we outsource in our company: accounting, legal, facilities (they're crap because I'm cheap, but we don't run 'em), health insurance, payroll, marketing, sales leads, and the list goes on.  Amazing.  In my first startup we insourced everything but web design - and that was only because you simply could not hire a web designer during the first boom. 

I think we're going to have an internal conversation about outsourcing our SEO, which seems astoundingly peculiar to me because we've built a large primary business on web content and are building another business on tools to help SEO people use social networking sites better.  So, obviously we understand this stuff well enough to (a) make good money, and (b) build software around it.

But I also understand payroll, facilities, etc.  And I don't do them either. So why not outsource something that is in my core competency?  I'm sure there are a dozen SEO firms that could help us maintain or improve our main business for less than what we spend on it in house.  Why should I be embarrassed that XYZ can do what we do cheaper?  If I have a FTE (Full Time Equivalent) spend of, say, $100K to SEO our business, could I spend that on an outside firm and get the same/better results?  Probably.

Can we deploy that FTE onto other projects that give us a wider SERP footprint and therefore more revenue?  Undoubtedly - our list of "traffic to-do's" is enormous.  And my internal guys know what we do and how to do it.  If they weren't tweaking link patterns to make Google happier, they could, you know, rollout additional revenue sites.  In my gut I am certain that we could spend $10K/month on a consultant and, after six months or so, pop our bottom line up $15K or $20K easily.

We're going to have to run the numbers on this to make such a strategic decision and then work to get buying - it's always tricky to take someone's tasks away from them.  My fear is that we have one or two particular guys who think this is actually the most interesting part of their job.  If they don't get to do it anymore, then they might leave.

There you go, a good dilemma to have, but one where I'd be happy to take some wisdom from the crowd - have any of you had experience with this?  Lucky for us this is a good dilemma, and I don't think we'd move on it until after the Christmas rush, so we have time to ponder and talk to smart people.

Cheers,

-OT