Hosted / managed Services versus Local Server/LAN?

aidancoughlan

A friend of mine asked me for recommendations for IT hardware/software combination for a small business (server, 3 desktops, 2 laptops). Their requirement is pretty basic Microsoft Office on desktops, email via Outlook, and most of all *remote access* to files, and ideally applications for a small number of remote employees.

I googl'ed a couple of Microsoft Small Business Specialists locally in Dublin and sent them in that direction.

I expected that they would propose a server-based LAN in the office running Microsoft SBS 2008, exchange, sharepoint etc., and provide access to this from outside the office via some sort of connectivity over the internet. A local server would provide plenty of cost effective space etc. for Emails, Photos etc.

A couple of the vendors are proposing "hosted" SBS services (no local server), with as little as 6GB space allocated per user. It seems more expensive to me (annual charges) when compared to a reasonably costed LAN solution, and the GB limits seem very low.

Can anyone advise on the pros/cons of the "hosted" route, and alternatively any advice on what is possible nowadays in terms of making a small business LAN email, files etc. available to remote employees. I'm prepared to read a bit, but need a few pointers...

johnmd

aidancoughlan wrote: »

A friend of mine asked me for recommendations for IT hardware/software combination for a small business (server, 3 desktops, 2 laptops). Their requirement is pretty basic Microsoft Office on desktops, email via Outlook, and most of all *remote access* to files, and ideally applications for a small number of remote employees.

I googl'ed a couple of Microsoft Small Business Specialists locally in Dublin and sent them in that direction.

I expected that they would propose a server-based LAN in the office running Microsoft SBS 2008, exchange, sharepoint etc., and provide access to this from outside the office via some sort of connectivity over the internet. A local server would provide plenty of cost effective space etc. for Emails, Photos etc.

A couple of the vendors are proposing "hosted" SBS services (no local server), with as little as 6GB space allocated per user. It seems more expensive to me (annual charges) when compared to a reasonably costed LAN solution, and the GB limits seem very low.

Can anyone advise on the pros/cons of the "hosted" route, and alternatively any advice on what is possible nowadays in terms of making a small business LAN email, files etc. available to remote employees. I'm prepared to read a bit, but need a few pointers...

A few quick things come to mind
Hosted pros.
No upfront hardware or Capex costs to the business.
No hardware refresh every three years.
Scales with your business.
Provides easy secure https access from anywhere for sharepoint,outlook and terminal services (if combined with remote web workplace,or similar ssl based vpn setup).

Hosted,meaning it lives in the data center and not in your office,in which case you will need to access the box via a combination of sharepoint and outlook web/mobile/https over rpc for outlook client.
If its combined with a remote terminal server you can run all most of your windows apps,eg office etc and access via remote web workplace to connect via the web from anywhere,but then you need a second virtual server to do this.

DIsadvantages.
1.Where is the virtual box hosted and on what underlying virtual platform is it hosted eg vmware,hyper-v,xen,parallells etc.
2.How much data center redundancy is built into their solution,connectivity,hardware,power etc.
3.If the office broadband goes down they wont be able to access anything as its all in the data center,so provision a firewall in house with a second cheap pipe for redundancy.
4.Cost per gig over time 6gigs seems a bit small depending on the type of business.Given data doubles every 18months you could be hit with a larger bill going forwards.
5.Backup of data,how is this done,where is it held and is is encrypted etc.

Syquus

Hosted solutions always have the pro that they are on a by-far faster network that you can ever dream of having in your offices. That make sense when you have information (documents, website, corporate software) to share with others.

If you don't pretend to share data (and specially HEAVY data, GBs...) forget about hosted solutions.

If you still want to use hosted solutions, it strongly depends on reliability levels you want to complain. There are solutions like Hostgator, with hosting starting at 4USD, and fiving you several GB (from 25 to infinite**)

**:There are caps, like file numbers (usually, 1 million).

Also, hosted solutions (cheap ones) gives you limited bandwith, this means, for example, 100GB/month.. But As I said

• Do they need to share/access information OVER internet?
• How reliable should be the solution?

You can always make a local cheap server, with a simple RAID5 and a redundant power supply, to make it very very reliable, at a low cost (with no high processing requirements, and storage limits within personal computing prices, maybe with SATA...)

This thread could be endless....
Tell us more information on this if you need any further information

Cheers!