Accounting and ERP systems are the least forgiving workload most businesses run. They are busy in bursts, they punish latency, and the worst possible week for an outage is the one week everyone needs them.
They also host perfectly well, provided the environment is built for them rather than for a generic web application. Here is what to check, whoever you end up hosting with.
Before you move
- Confirm your licence travels. Some accounting software is licensed per installation or per named device. Check with your vendor or reseller before, not after.
- Measure what you have now. Peak concurrent users, database size, and how long your slowest routine report takes today. Without a baseline you cannot tell whether the move helped.
- Find the integrations. Payroll exports, bank feeds, POS synchronisation, a reporting tool somebody built years ago. These are what break during migrations and they are rarely documented.
- Decide how users will connect. Remote desktop, a published application, or a direct database connection over secure access. This drives everything else about the design.
Sizing it properly
Accounting workloads are more sensitive to disk and memory than to raw CPU count. A SQL database that fits in RAM behaves completely differently from one that does not, and enterprise SSD storage matters more than another two cores.
As a rough starting point: a small practice with a handful of concurrent users is comfortable on 4 vCPU and 8 GB of RAM. Multi-entity firms running consolidated reporting want 8 vCPU and 16 GB. Heavy ERP use with large databases starts at 16 vCPU and 64 GB. Our accounting VPS plans are built around these shapes.
The questions to ask your host
- Where is the server physically, and what is the latency from our offices?
- Is the backup application-aware for SQL, and how long is retention?
- Who patches the operating system, and when?
- What sits in front of the server, and is remote desktop exposed to the internet?
- What happens at 17:00 on the last day of the month if it stops responding?
That fourth question matters more than it looks. Remote desktop published directly to the internet is one of the most reliably attacked services there is. It belongs behind a firewall and secure access, not on a public port with a password.
Timing
Do not migrate during a financial year end, a VAT submission week or a payroll run. The best window is usually the first fortnight of a new period, with the old environment kept intact and switched off a month later rather than immediately.
We migrate accounting environments at no charge, and we will tell you if your timing is a bad idea. Ask us.