Your hosting service may have a range of inhouse or mainstream software or hardware solutions that you only need to ask about. There may be more to their services than simply hosting a web site or network. You may find that there are interoperability issues between certain applications and you can’t find a solution. There may be a need to amalgamate certain pieces of information that should be on one single database but they are scattered over a number of databases, servers, and applications in a variety of file formats. You may want to place them all in one database that can be accessed by everyone in a way that they are already familiar so that no extra training is required. The hosting service may have the tools powerful enough to gather this information for you without the need to copy and paste thousands and thousands of times.

Another factor to consider is scalability, particularly in a growing organization or industry. A hosting service is likely to provide statistics such as how many hits you get to your site – and how many purchases are made from the site. They can work out ratios like how many site visitors actually made purchases too, and how many purchasers returned to make a second or third purchase of a product or service. However, it only takes one well connected tweet to bring so many visitors to your site that your own server would crash. A hosting service would make allowances for this in terms of capacity. Company networks can be enhanced too, to accommodate new employees or temporary or contract staff.

A consultation for advice may be free of charge – particularly if you already avail of the VPS host’s service. If the hosting service can provide the solution at a reasonable rate, all the better.