Seven Essential Questions for SaaS Hosting Providers

Software as a service (SaaS) continues to gain momentum among software business executives as a more cost-effective and easier-to-control delivery mechanism. SaaS has the added benefit of a recurring and predictable revenue stream. However, the move to SaaS often leaves ambitious software companies with two major headaches:

How do you continue to provide excellent service without making large capital investments in essential IT infrastructure and facilities?

How do you minimize ongoing operating expenses and technical staff costs of being ahead of the game in a very competitive environment?

Below are 7 essential questions any business should ask themselves before selecting a SaaS hosting provider.

1) Is a 100% service guarantee the same as an SLA?
SaaS hosting providers offer a certain level of functionality to their customers, and the level of service is specified in a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Many SaaS hosting providers will offer a “100% guaranteed” uptime. However, this does not mean that they offer 100% uptime. Instead, SaaS hosting providers receive a service credit if 100% uptime is not delivered. Therefore, companies should carefully review vendor uptime statistics and SLAs to ensure they are consistent with the SLA being offered to customers. Also ask for details in writing about how they deliver their power, network and server SLAs.

2) Do they get the big picture?
Do you want to know the worst nightmare of a hosting provider of a SaaS company? Signing a contract only to find that your provider does little more than deliver ‘ping, power & pipe’.

What is saved in low monthly costs is often lost by not being able to expand infrastructure to support rapid growth or quickly recover from operational problems. Please ensure that you obtain a full written understanding of the business and technical relationship to be established prior to entering into a contract with a SaaS hosting provider.

3) Do you offer ‘high availability’ managed dedicated servers?
Enterprise-class data centers require significant capital investments to provide and maintain the space, power, cooling, and network functionality in a cost-effective way for SaaS companies to take advantage of. At the server level, this translates to being able to offer a variety of high-end, affordable managed server solutions to suit business requirements.

Compare that approach to one where a SaaS hosting provider assigns an in-house developer the often hurried task of deploying misconfigured servers for testing, staging, and even production. That infrastructure quickly becomes a growth bottleneck due to security, reliability, or scalability issues.

4) How do you balance real-time maintenance windows with always-on service?
If a SaaS hosting provider’s hardware stack is designed correctly and redundant hardware is used correctly, full production availability can be maintained even during a maintenance window.

Real-time maintenance allows new features to be rolled out quickly, as maintenance windows do not need to be scheduled or advertised to customers. Developers will appreciate it because they can work more normal business hours, but in a real-time maintenance environment. Users also like it because it increases their confidence in the reliability and stability of the entire application solution.

5) How exactly will managed server hosting solutions keep pace with your business growth?
A major challenge for a SaaS hosting provider is sizing the “store” correctly. It is very important to select a hosting provider that has the infrastructure to support future growth.

For example, a business starts with dedicated servers and a backup server managed in the same data center. Then, as customers and data traffic increase, the business model will require backup data to be securely replicated offsite every day.

But if the managed server hosting provider only has one data center, how will this be achieved? Such unplanned limitations can become significant obstacles to the expansion of SaaS companies.

6) Do you offer professional incident management and escalation procedures?
Nothing is more frustrating as a SaaS hosting provider than getting little or no information about a service issue from the hosting provider.

The best SaaS hosting providers have a highly visible and genuine service culture that prevents this from happening to customers. Expect to see systems like port-level network monitoring plus automatic trouble ticket notification in the event of a service issue.

Any reputable SaaS hosting provider should follow clearly documented guidelines for all aspects of configuration and change management. If necessary, ask to see these documents.

The best SaaS hosting providers will also show their willingness to help with application updates by involving their network engineers and systems administration staff to minimize the impact of any service outages.

7) How can a business be sure that their customer’s application data is securely and reliably hosted by the SaaS provider?
The Internet has given a whole new meaning to the idea of ​​a ‘data bank’. For SaaS hosting providers, it is becoming critical that a trusted business partner securely and reliably hosts their customer data.

To some extent, managed dedicated servers hosted in an outsourced data center have now become a trusted data bank on which the SaaS business model depends.

SaaS companies that address these 7 questions before choosing a SaaS hosting provider will increase their uptime and minimize their frustrations with their server infrastructure. This allows them to focus on the most value-added portion of the SaaS business model: the application and user experience.