Cutting cost on these financial troubling times is challenge to business executives. IT is one area where people easily point as a cost saving opportunity. There are things like virtual servers and cloud hosting which lures management to consider. We also are looking into these technologies not only as a solution to cut cost, but also to improve operations.

There are many business operations that could be cloud-hosted such as accounting, email, document control, and others which comes very cheap or even free. Compare running your own mail server as hosting emails with Google. Sure there’s a very big savings with Google. But will it be worth it when all the emails are inaccessible when Google experience mail service outage? This kind of scenario is scary to think.

A common thing missed when farming out business applications to an external cloud application provider is technical support. Technical support services should be looked upon closely. Technical support arrangements should be detailed, clear and agreed upon by both parties. There are cases when I am frustrated with web hosting support as they only provide limited assistance. Sometimes the support ticket response is too slow or worst not as expected. Online chat assistance is for limited cases only and you’ll end up calling which is costly.

Thus, technical support for cloud-hosted services should be studied carefully. If good support and a very fast reply to problems are required then certain level of service should be guaranteed by the cloud hosting provider. A web application provider with excellent reputation for speedy resolution of problems is desirable. There are times that technical problems could be solved by the client. When choosing cloud hosting application provider, technical support should be on the top of the list. A level of support that you’ll get which is acceptable to you should be considered.