bmg002 - Tuesday, March 7, 2017 10:23 AM
Hi bmg002,
Thank you for the quick response I can confirm that you are correct that we would require 99.99% uptime so cloud hosting is something that we can definitely consider.
I have briefly looked around at suppliers and are prepared to pay for hosting! - In terms of SQL Express limitations, yes I was aware that it had limitations but never delve into what they where specifically, and when it comes to separating out customers and instances then I agree that it would be best to have an instance per customer as it would get extremely messy having multiple ports!
When it comes to backups we are not talking massive amounts of data (although the data is crucial) a typical customer backup will be anywhere from 5MB - 100MB (depending on the size of the client and how long the system runs for will dictate this, I believe the biggest backup to date is around 900MB but it has been running for a good 5-6 years and we do not have many of those. Ideally for those customers we would force the client's hand to have it stored on their own servers so for this aspect I would say the biggest backup we will come across is only likely to be 100MB (and that's far fetched!) for maybe up to a total of 5 customers max.
For the client in mind hosting data in the cloud will not be an issue (permitting the data is secure) - when it comes to the legal side of things I'm currently stumped - would this not sit with the cloud provider for whom we choose to go with?
In terms of budget I can't say we have anything allocated yet, we have spoken with a few providers both local to us in location and online providers and understanding what it is they are laying out in their quotes differ and the pricing varies dramatically!
jasona.work - Tuesday, March 7, 2017 1:11 PM
Thanks for the reply Jasona I guess reasons behind forwarding through the firewalls is to make it as simplistic for our client(s) as we can (as we all know how tedious it can be to get them to action simple tasks!) with the idea is our application sits on there desktop, they double click it and away they go!