Service or Host?

One of the simple facts of my job is that I get a lot of press releases. Really. Tons of the things. Even before I got the opportunity to work with SMB IT, I started noticing an awful of press releases talking about one of two things. The first was services aimed at SMB customers — various office productivity applications, security, or mobility enhancement hosted by a service provider so the SMB doesn’t have to fool around with setting up and maintaining even a small appliance on their own premises. The second was small, essentially plug-and-play appliances that provide e-mail, security, mobility enhancement, or any of a number of other services to the SMB. The two sides of this broad issue presents a basic question: To host, or not to host?

Both sets of solutions are based on the (very reasonable) assumption that an SMB doesn’t have a big IT staff sitting around ready to take on the care and feeding of expansive self-hosted applications. I get that. What I’m curious about is where you draw the line on whether you want to have an application (or service) running on a box you can touch, or on a maintained server somewhere else.

In my case, I’m happy to let someone else manage the servers for my e-mail and web services. In general, I figure a large provider will have an ISP that treats them better than I’m treated, and I really want to be able to get to those services wherever I am. On the other hand, I want my office productivity apps on my workstation. I know this is a throwback point of view, but there are still times when I can work on my laptop even without an Internet connection, and I’d like to keep it that way.

What do you think? Please drop an email to me and let me know how you get your applications. I’m curious, and I’ll use your answers to guide some of the coverage in this column.