Moving IIS c/w SQL Express DB Offsite (CRM)

[drew]

Hi All, we have a CRM (Gold Vision v7) that runs on our server locally. I contacted them to look at the options but baulked at the £800 a month they wanted!

I'd like to shove it into the cloud for ease of accessibility by our users.

It currently runs on our local Server 2012, am I right in thinking the lowest cost option would be a cloud server like this? https://www.simplyhosting.com/cloud/servers

There are very few users, less than 10 so not worried about server load and the amount of space required is limited.

I need to find someone on Upwork to do it but not sure what to ask for.

Thanks in advance.

 

[drew]

£800 for what? If you put in cloud then you still have to pay £800?

why can your users access the system where it is now?

That's to host and manage it on their servers.

We have a complicated setup for internet and the server it runs on is a dog (due to be upgraded).

 

[drew]

£9600 per annum is "cheap" to host a small CRM?

 

[drew]

To use their solution was 800 a month. To use our own cloud we had to upgrade to 10 users from 5 which made the difference negligible.

It’s been running relatively fine on our server and we pay them for support annually. To move from version 7 to 8 means you have to get a SQL server which I am not going to do.

The database is around 800mb

 

[drew]

What's your current CPU + RAM + Storage in the server and how much of that is actually being used?

£800/month is probably 10x more than what you could realistically be paying but all depends on your server resource usage.

I'd avoid simplyhosting though, part of the Register group who swallow up companies and turn them bad.

Drop me a message/trust if you like, happy to give some impartial advice and prevent you getting ripped off

Thanks for replying, its sat on a HP MicroServer that's running our Domain Controller right now, this has 13gb of RAM with 2 x Xeon E3-1220L

I just checked the MDF file is 9gb, i'm not sure how much processing power it uses

Our DC was moved onto this MicroServer as a temporary fix by our IT company when we ran out of disk space due to the way it was originally setup (something to do with deleted files not actually freeing up disk space!)
The MicroServer is really struggling so looking to get the CRM off it as part of a decommission process and putting a new DC in.

 

[drew]

As a very budgetary estimate to give you an idea and stop you getting ripped off ("£800 is cheap" lol), a dedicated server exceeding those specs (E3-1230v3 / 16GB / 2x 500GB SSD in RAID 1) with semi-management (i.e. enough to get your Gold-Vision running) would set you back £135/month excl VAT.

If you can check actual usage of the server i.e. within Windows itself then you could likely find you don't require that much CPU + RAM and could even drop to a VPS for even more savings.

It's using very little resources. I think a VPS would be fine. Is it as simple as finding a professional and say move that from here to there please?

 

[drew]

The solution currently uses active directory logins, it was open to the world via a url and then accessed with a password, but something happened to our network so its not accessible now unless you're inside the network either on-prem or VPN.

 

[drew]

You could get a vpn on site and have users dial into it. You would need to test to see how fast this solution would be though then that means you would save the cost on moving the database.

Do not open that database up to the world without over viewing security.

What about moving it to a VPS and only allowing connections via a VPN from our office that has a fixed IP?