Server slowing you down?

     The answer is simpler than you might think.

If you’re thinking it might be time to chuck out that old piece of junk and take your company to the cloud… well…just hold on.

A cloud-based environment (e.g. dropbox) is the way to go if you run a start-up or micro business. But maybe that’s not you. Maybe your company sells medical supplies, landscapes gardens, provides business services, manufactures packaging materials or runs a retail store. Every day we deal with lots of customers just like yours. And what are these companies doing this year when it comes time to replacing their servers? They moved to the cloud, right?

Wrong. They simply upgraded their servers.

That’s right. These savvy business owners who have existing applications running on old servers are not going to the cloud. Instead, they are buying new servers.

They probably had the same concerns as you – watching the dollars in a slow economy, squeezing as much out of their equipment till it became impossible… so why didn’t these businesses move to Cloud? They all came to the same conclusion: it was just too expensive. Sorry media. Sorry tech world. But this is the truth. Cloud is not yet as affordable as everyone makes out.

We regularly evaluate cloud based hosting services from Amazon, Microsoft and Rackspace. These are popular options and for specific needs that make a lot of sense. Cloud is an interesting proposition for VoIP (digital phone systems), mail and back-up but when our customers run the numbers for de-commissioning their server and switching to the cloud, the value is not quite there.

We’ve run the numbers. A 20-user firm with basic server needs might pay $2,000 per month or $24,000 per year for a comprehensive Cloud-based service (this is just an example). How many servers can you buy for that amount? Even when you consider the cost of on-site installation and support you’ll find the traditional server maintenance plans are still the most favourable option for many businesses.

So if your server is slowing you down then give us a call and review your options.