• If Misrosoft offer hosting to comercial companies, I suspect they will discover some of the realities of the commercial world. Having worked for a hosting provider that also offered management services (OS, DBA, etc), I can say that the customer is king.

    Very few customers are willing to pay for an upgrade just because it is available. They need a business incentive - such as reduced hardware, software and administration costs - to outweigh the business risk of making a change. Some customers are very intolerant of risk - my understanding is the IBM are (or were until recently) hosting services for a particular bank that was using software released in the mid 1980s. The customer felt that paying for support for the obsolete software was less risk than upgrading. Other customers are willing to exploit new software as they can see it will help give them a business advantage, but this does not always mean they will move every existing production system to the new stuff.

    Even if Microsoft start out today only offering to host SQL Server 2008 and above, I suspect that in 2020 they will still have a number of SQL Server 2008 instances being hosted. Their only other choices are terminating the contract or offering to pay the upgrade costs - neither of which are as financially attractive as taking the money and supporting what by then will be a very low cost platform.

    Original author: https://github.com/SQL-FineBuild/Common/wiki/ 1-click install and best practice configuration of SQL Server 2019, 2017 2016, 2014, 2012, 2008 R2, 2008 and 2005.

    When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor they call me a communist - Archbishop Hélder Câmara