Internet Database based Services find a suitable service provider
When you have your business activities on the Internet then you have a major requirement to provide Business Continuity in finding the suitable/sustainable service provider. So I believe there are few key factors you need to consider such as the location of the provider, such as how easy it will be for you to reach the provider. Why? The reason I bring up
distance is because it is really split in the industry. You have some saying I
want it close to my office for convenience, then you have the other half saying
I want it out of my city in case of natural disaster. My answer is if you want
it close great, but make sure
that any backups you do at the data center of
choice are taken out of the city that way you are protected.
Find what kind of services that provider can offer, such as Disaster Recovery for your data and backup handling which is a major criteria to choose a service provider in my experience. Not only that how you can believe them about the security to your data and no limits of getting performance for the application, no matter what happens.
So when you are chosing the provider you have to be sure on services based on SQL Server databases that can benefit
largely by offering Database Change Management. DUe to the management factor that Service Providers allocate separate account(s) in the SQL Server database
running in their network for their customers to host any web
service/application. Any modification to be done to the production database
schema would be done by the customer either by themselves or in coordination
with the provider. These updates, would typically involve comparing the new
schema against the existing schema (in the production database), generating
migration scripts and executing the same to propagate the new changes into the
hosted production database.
This involves tedious and error-prone manual work due to lack of hosted sql
server database change management tool which is remotely accessible being
offered by the service providers . Additionally it also mandates the customer to
maintain the various migration scripts/updated schema to have an audit trail of
the schema changes done over a period of time