Home topics small-business-resources growing Growing Tech Growing Maximising your IT options Dave Stevens October 10, 2008 Today, many SMEs have IT services such as phones and utilities supplied by a third party IT expert . But what will work best for you and what do you need to consider? If you’re an SME owner, the chances are that some form of hosted IT services will be on the menu for your business in the future. The question is less about whether you will use hosted services than which services you will buy and which you will retain in house. Hosted services have been around for years and, if your business has a website, chances are you already use someone external to host it. The benefit is one of cost; instead of having to purchase and configure your own web server and ensure it is running 24/7, a hosting specialist does it for a number of businesses. The cost of providing the hardware, server software and applications, and support is spread across a number of businesses. Many other hosting services work in a similar way where hardware or software is shared between a number of businesses but with each user operating in an environment which is transparent to the other users. If the software requirements are more specialised and complex and if integration with other business applications is required, a shared software solution may be replaced with a dedicated solution. While it is still hosted and may still be hosted on