As with all things Cloud, hosted SharePoint usually comes out on top as compared to on-premise SharePoint and for several good reasons.
Initial costs
Let’s begin with the cost factor: if you are a huge corporation with deep pockets, you could very well set up a state-of-the-art infrastructure, and do an on-premise SharePoint installation. As for the others, hosted SharePoint makes much more sense, since it comes with pre-determined and affordable monthly costs, guaranteed uptime, top security and on-demand scalability. And then there is round-the-year, 24 x 7 tech support thrown-in for free.
Human resources
The next thing to consider would be the people, or rather the tech expertise, if you want an on-premise SharePoint. Hiring SharePoint specialists in-house to install, set-up, manage, and maintain SharePoint is definitely not a low-budget operation. While not always, but often, you would find “hidden” costs/fees while you are about to finish up the on-premise deployment. An all-included hosted SharePoint is the obvious alternative.
Time and opportunity costs
Time cost, and thereby, opportunity cost is another important consideration while choosing SharePoint. Having on-premise SharePoint usually means keeping the IT support staff almost always busy with updates, fixes, ironing out performance kinks, resolving issues, maintaining the infrastructure, so on and so forth. On the other hand, having a hosted SharePoint on the cloud means freeing up the IT team to totally concentrate on the business processes and add value.
Scalability
Hosted SharePoint solutions also score over on-premise in terms of the go-as-you-grow perspective. You could start with a simple hosted SharePoint package – say a “Silver” plan – and keep moving up the chain right till the “Platinum” variety. When you grow bigger, you could choose the semi-dedicated or even a dedicated server option that will give you more capabilities and more power, with the unbeatable convenience of the cloud that you would have come to love by then.
What are the solutions?
Hosted SharePoint from CloudAppsPortal is right at the top of the list, when you consider hosted SharePoint providers. True to the name, they provide a free, 100% functional SharePoint site, which actually allows you to explore first-hand the hosted experience for as long as you want.
Their paid plans are quite reasonably priced and flexible enough to suit most business needs. Their hosting servers are in New York data centers, with 99.9% guaranteed uptime. Backups and 24 x 7 technical support are included in the paid plans.
What probably clinches the deal in favor of CloudAppsPortal.com is the fact that there are no long-term commitments forced upon – you pay as you go, month-to-month, and scale up or down as you wish.
