Remote Server Hosting

Question

For most small businesses, having an IT team is really not a possibility. You end up with someone wearing an accounting hat and an IT systems administrator hat and you end up losing in both worlds.

If you were a small business (less than 10 employees) that needed the following things, who could you outsource this functionality to?

1. Exchange or Email Hosting
2. SharePoint - Intranet Site
3. Sql Server - For Internal Applications
4. IIS - For Internal Web Applications
5. Domain Management
6. Print Server
7. File Server

Small business server is a great tool. But not having the expertise on staff to support it really increases the costs of doing business. Outsourcing the hosting to other businesses could in theory improve other areas of the business.

Who is best suited to host this stuff? Essentially, a hosted small business server solution would be outstanding!

Answer 1

Where I live there are a number of companies that will work with a small business to determine needs, estimate costs, and then purchase, install, and manage pretty much whatever a business needs in terms of phones, file servers, e-mail, backup, etc. These range from small three-person operations all the way up to companies with a 24/7 help desk and roaming technicians who will come to your office and do whatever you need to have done (for a reasonable fee, of course). If you live in any decent sized town/city there are probably one or more of these "outsourced IT departments" that would love the opportunity to help a small/medium sized business get things going.

Answer 2

Unfortunately you cannot get hosted SBS systems as Microsofts licensing does not allow.

It seems to me that from your requirements you do really need an onsite server, particuarly when your talking about print serving and domain management. I think you would find that if you used a hosted solution, there would be alot of things you would miss. SBS is ideally suited to your sort of organisation, if you have a hard time managing it, have you considered paying a local IT company to manage it for you. There are many local companies out there with alot of experience who will charge good rates to come out once every couple of weeks to manage things, or to administrator it remotely. This gives you all the benefits of a local server, with someone else taking care of the management.

Answer 3

I'd keep your file server in house purely due to network performance reasons. A small business isn't likely to have a high speed internet connection, downloading files on a regular basis from a remote connection isn't going to be very efficient.

Answer 4

Try these guys http://rclick.com/

I suggest that you keep your File Server in-house.

I do not work for Right Click. But I know somebody who uses their services.

Ask this guy baiju@rclick.com

:-)

Answer 5

Google? (specifically Google Apps for Domains)

Unless you had some line of business tool that absolutely depended on SQL Server it's probably worth a look.