Spend Your Online Backup Money Wisely

There are three (3) major costs in hosting your online backup; physical assets, software, and expertise. These are typically bundled together to maximize profit and lock in customers over a period of time; both worthy objectives and to a point, necessary in a healthy relationship.

What if however, these could be split apart without affecting the quality of the solution ? In other words, both the vendors offering the service(s) and their customers remain well served. This is the promise that new technologies such as the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offer.

EC2 is the simple and cost effective way to get the physical assets you need at a reasonable price, and the best news of all is that no-one gets hurt. We have all experienced situations where a vendor prices aggressively and is literally forced to cut corners elsewhere to survive. Isolating the cost and benefits for the physical hosting keeps this from happening.

In a bundled online backup solution the cost of the software is typically spread out over time along with the physical assets. This is convenient but not ideal. Instead, you should buy your software outright so you can make the proper valuation. In other words, a $995 software package costs about $80 bucks a month in the first year, then drops to around $40 in the second, and $28 in the third. Again, if the cost of quality hosting can be isolated and transparent, then it definitely makes sense to independently value the software.

Last but not least, the expertise. This is perhaps the trickiest of all. Most hosting relationships are NOT transparent. In other words, you are obligated to pay the vendor to "see" into their world. Once you control the hosting and own the software then you just need some help upfront and the random assist moving forward. Most of all, you should be able to come and go as you please - with no long term commitments and of course, your software under your arm.

Divide and prosper.