Tech Peeps: What is average Exchange hosting cost?

[TurboGizzmo]

So i want to poll the techy folks with our whole Exchange hosting thing we've gotten ourselves into......

So management says lets switch to exchange because we neeeeeeeeed calendars but since we dont have time or resources to handle it lets host it for a year or so and after that we can review if we want to bring it in house or not.

So after having the company come in and get all our details and needs they setup a 50 user lics box with 100gig harddrive started out costing around $800 a month but after some "needed" adjustments in bandwidth and processor in memory is now costing us about $1,600 a month on the *cloud.

After a issue with the box harddrive reaching some magical threshold it froze with no alert to us. Contacting the company running it they claim you could setup alerts if you want or we will monitor it for extra.....I am thinking to my self we are going to hit 2k for a Exchange box that now i have to babysit and monitor and if we double in size again this year its going to be 4-5k a month......is this normal?

For this almost $20k a year i assume we could get a built Exchange Server for $10k and budget the other $10k for some company/consultant to manage it when needed for higher level config. (but honestly at this point I am familiar with almost every part of it even though the idea was to "off load" me and i dont want to be a mailman)

*I am also wondering if they are throwing around the word "cloud" as a buzz word to charge a premium....or if they quoted low knowing those resources wouldnt sustain us and would require upgrades a few months in.....ugh /rant

[Sarge]

Google Apps. $50/Year per user. Can use your own e-mail address, rediculous storage, works with Outlook and Calender, and it's Google.

[vort3xr6]

Google Apps. $50/Year per user. Can use your own e-mail address, rediculous storage, works with Outlook and Calender, and it's Google.


^^^^THIS x100000

I have been pitching it to our company for months. Doubt we will do it but I know a lot of organizations are going this route.

[TurboGizzmo]

^^^^THIS x100000

I have been pitching it to our company for months. Doubt we will do it but I know a lot of organizations are going this route.

Tried to, just not the "industry standard" and privacy concerns since google isnt too clear with what they monitor and that cant happen with what we deal with. Plus the added security of the remote wipe and enterprise BB support, blah blah.

If it was more up to me i would have slapped a exchange calendar clone onto the old system.

[longrider]

For hosted Exchange check out Rackspace, $10/month per user:

http://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/exchange_hosting/

I am using their non-Exchange hosted email for our company and have been quite satisfied

[Devaclis]

How many users?

You can install Windows Small Business Server with exchange and easily manage it in-house for less then co-location hosting, servercing, and support.

There are some restrictions with SBS that you may want to look into to make sure it fits in your scheme.

In my past experience I have ALWAYS setup exchange on 2 servers, mirrored, for fault tolerance. Having a single exchange server failure and restoring the OS and DB is pretty time consuming and can lead to cost prohibitive down time.

I would REALLY suggest you talk to Leah. She is extremely knowlegable in the Exchange realm and has given some great advice in the past.

[Panman06]

If you have Exchange Admins in house or have knowledge of Exchange Administration, I recommend to bring in house.

For 50 users, I would set up a two node exchange cluster on iSCSI storage. That way you have failover/redundancy and with possible load balancing. If your company is set on using Exchange, then ROI will be about 3 years compared to your current hosting service.

[TurboGizzmo]

How many users?

You can install Windows Small Business Server with exchange and easily manage it in-house for less then co-location hosting, servercing, and support.

There are some restrictions with SBS that you may want to look into to make sure it fits in your scheme.

In my past experience I have ALWAYS setup exchange on 2 servers, mirrored, for fault tolerance. Having a single exchange server failure and restoring the OS and DB is pretty time consuming and can lead to cost prohibitive down time.

I would REALLY suggest you talk to Leah. She is extremely knowlegable in the Exchange realm and has given some great advice in the past.

60 users but its changes depending on work load but this is the other PITA keeping up with all the CALs when employees come and go....

At this point I am fine with having it inhouse, the whole idea was to outsource so that i didnt need to come up to speed on something so fast (plus upfront budget costs for server/licenses) but i have put in some long hours learning the command console and hub transports and relays and batch updating.....

I knew there was some Exchange savvy people on here, so keep the advice coming.

[Ricky]

I laugh at those that try to compare google's mail solution, to Exchange. They just don't compare.

I am the everything admin for 2 companies. Total of 15 employees. IMO, go the hosted route if you are not exchange/AD savvy, and you want to always have the latest and greatest without all the hassle. Otherwise, do it yourself. We do our own exchange here, but there are days I wish it were hosted. The up side is that we have everything right here in house. No slowness due to internet bandwidth. Large attachments are delivered in seconds rather than having to go over the internet twice. (to server from sender, from server to recipient). I just finished our migration from Exchange 2003 to 2010, and it took me awhile, but I figured it out. Everyone is stoked about the differences. I'm also glad I have the control of the server, and logs and stuff like that.

With 60 users, I suggest going with something in-house. Also, steer far clear of Small Business Server.

[Panman06]

I laugh at those that try to compare google's mail solution, to Exchange. They just don't compare.

I am the everything admin for 2 companies. Total of 15 employees. IMO, go the hosted route if you are not exchange/AD savvy, and you want to always have the latest and greatest without all the hassle. Otherwise, do it yourself. We do our own exchange here, but there are days I wish it were hosted. The up side is that we have everything right here in house. No slowness due to internet bandwidth. Large attachments are delivered in seconds rather than having to go over the internet twice. (to server from sender, from server to recipient). I just finished our migration from Exchange 2003 to 2010, and it took me awhile, but I figured it out. Everyone is stoked about the differences. I'm also glad I have the control of the server, and logs and stuff like that.

With 60 users, I suggest going with something in-house. Also, steer far clear of Small Business Server.

I agree. For small/medium companies that do not have enterprise level IT, hosted mail service is the way to go. However, if there is knowledge in house then it takes very little time to get ROI.

We've got an 8 node exchange cluster tied into iSCSI storage. One node is dedicated to public folders. We split our user load up by last name. e.g A-E Server 1; F-L Server 2; and so on. This allows us to balance our load and maintains redundancy. The only suck part of Exchange 2010 is we broke Android users who were using the default Google sync. BB, iPhone, and Android users with TouchDown were fine. Got a premiere ticket open with MS on this.