Additional Income from Reselling Hosted SharePoint and Hosted Exchange Services

                                                                                         

Say you’re an entrepreneur or consultant in the IT industry and you are looking to find new streams of income. You know that cloud computing is the wave of the future, and providing hosted Microsoft services is definitely a way to generate revenue. The question then becomes not whether to provide this service to you clients, but whether you should host the services yourself, or reselling hosted services such as Exchange and SharePoint from a trusted application service provider like Apps4Rent.
If you have ever hosted websites, web applications, intranets, or other solutions for your clients, then you are aware of some of the things you have to have to make this happen. There are many technical requirements to hosting this type of service.
Network
One word to sum it up, Bandwidth. if you plan on being very successful with your hosted Microsoft services, you have to be able to accommodate many users, which requires lots of bandwidth to make sure things move smoothly. Be prepared to make a sizable investment to beef up your backbone.
Hardware
Again, if you’re going to be successful, you are going to need the hardware to push the software, this includes new servers to handle the workload, battery backups for said servers, maybe other, off site servers to provide redundancy.
Data Protection
Clients who purchase your hosted services will want to know that their data is safe and secure. This means that you have to have IT staff and software to monitor the servers and services, to backup data and make sure that your clients assets are protected.
Administration
You will also need staff that is trained to administer these services and the server software running them. You have the option of trying to learn what is needed on the fly, or try to find someone available who is already skilled with hosted Microsoft services.
The biggest positives to hosting your own Microsoft services are the fact that you don’t share profit, and you have complete control over how the business is run. This is the way to go if you have the resources and require complete control.
Offering Microsoft SaaS as a Reseller
Reselling hosted Microsoft services is much less complicated overall, and is potentially much more rewarding. With a company like Apps4Rent.com that offers reseller hosting plans for Exchange and SharePoint, you need none of the above requirements. You just sell the service, and the rest is taken care of.
As you can see from the comparison, there is much less time, work and training needed to resell these services. In as little as a day, you can be ready to provide Hosted Exchange or SharePoint hosting service, without the backend hassle.

About the author:
Adrian Gates (Adrian@apps4rent.com) is a Business Manager with Apps4Rent http://www.apps4rent.com/hostedexchange.htm ; which offers premium , hosted Exchange, BlackBerry Enterprise Server Microsoft ActiveSync and Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services.

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