Hosted Services at a glance…

These days hosted services are taking over on premise services and equipment and most companies are going cloud based. However, if you don’t know what hosted services are or how they can help you and our business then why would you consider switching? In this blog post we are going to take a look at what a hosted service is, the different types of hosted services and how they can help you and your business save money while improving productivity.

What is a hosted service?

A hosted service is a technology based service that are offered to you or your company by a provider that hosts the physical servers running the service in a different location. Access to these services is generally provided by an internet connection, however there are some exceptions. Cloud services are also generally hosted services, and can be accessed as long as you have got an internet connection. One of the more common types of hosted services is email. The vast majority of companies use email in 2016 with some people using 3rd party providers and others having a physical server sat in their office that will look after their email for them. Email becomes a cloud service once the physical server sat in the office is taken out of the equation – however there is no distinct difference between the two other than the wording.

How can a hosted service help me and my business?

If your systems are starting to get out of date and you are looking to upgrade or refresh them, moving to a hosted service could save you money. Instead of investing in a new file server for the office or a new email server for the office, moving to a hosted file sharing or email solution will save you upfront costs on replacing old hardware with newer more modern hardware. This can also help out your cash flow, especially as a small business when money can be tight at times, as you don’t need large sums of money upfront. Instead, most commonly, hosted services will be billed on a per user, per month basis meaning that you can spread the cost out over time and easily budget by knowing what you are spending and how much additional services will cost.

Additionally, hosted services are highly flexible allowing you to add and remove from them with ease. If your company is to take on new members of staff then you can easily add new email accounts to your hosted service and get them online and running within a matter of moments. Alternatively, if a member of staff leaves your team then you will be able to remove their email account saving you money until you get someone to replace that member of staff.

Because hosted/cloud services are generally based in huge data centres with around the clock monitoring you know that you don’t have to worry about them going offline, whereas something as simple as a power cut to your office could bring your business to a grinding halt in a matter of seconds. Because of this, as long as you have an internet connection to your device you will be able to access your hosted services from anywhere in the world. In most cases you can also access them on any device as well! This will also help to improve company productivity. If someone from your office is unable to make it in today, maybe due to weather conditions, they simply need to fire up their laptop from home, connect to the internet and they can then access all their work files and systems allowing them to work as normal.

Different types of hosted services

There are many different types of hosted services, but below are some of the more common ones:

• Web Hosting
• Email Hosting
• VOIP
• File Sharing
• Remote Desktop Applications

If you choose to move to hosted services, the 5 above alone will be more than enough for you to create a virtual office and allow people to work from anywhere there is an internet connection.

How can Affordable IT help me go Hosted?

All of our Hosted Services are managed, meaning that we will deal with the initial setup and configuration for you as well as the ongoing management. This gives you peace of mind knowing that you can carry on running your business while we work in the background to improve the technical side of things.

If you would like to talk about going Hosted or are interested in one of our Hosted Solutions then please get in touch today by calling 02380 000 770 or by emailing it@aff-it.co.uk

We look forward to helping you and your business go hosted!