Should I use internal or external hosting for a PHP+MySQL company intranet?

Question

I am developing intranet system for large company (5000-10000 employs) and i would like to hear any comments or advices from the community.

The system consists of 2 parts:

1. Main Intranet system: Based on Company local server and all access will be within company local network.
2. Web site for company members: Company members can access from internet and thus use any available services.

The minor issue is to design right solution for 2 nd part, and by far i have considered those 2 ideas:

1. First thought was to have installed the main intranet system on company local network and have subsystem(for members access) on remote web hosting provider side. But in this case i will face to replicate part of DB into remote web hosting which breaks up the data integrity and privacy(financial reports ...).
2. Second thought was to have companies own hardware infrastructure at company office and to host the website for company members on its own. So company members can access to web site and request and view reports and perform other actions. But im not so sure about technical part for this case. Like how to put company own web server and serve requests from WWW and i would like to hear any info about this also.

Any advice or suggestion would be highly appreciated.

Answer 1

In your situation, I'd tend to go with the second option, internal hosting. The issues of having to secure your web server and so on aren't really any more involved than the issues of getting your data out to a third party and keeping that secure.

If you don't know how you'd go about having a publicly accessible web server, you should probably talk to your IT people and network service provider about it; the answers and concerns there are more of the nature of "what their entire job is about" than "something that can be packed into a StackOverflow answer".