QuickBooks Hosting Migration: 5 Things to Know Before Switching to a New Provider

We all know that switching from a QuickBooks hosting provider to another is not an overnight process. There are a lot of things – planning, execution, and testing, etc. that are involved in the process and result in a successful migration.

For businesses considering their first QuickBooks hosting migration, there are a lot of things that you should consider – from benefits to risks, from old platform to new cloud platform, and to knowing your options when you are all set up with a new provider.

In this post, we’ll look at some points that you should consider while migrating your QuickBooks data and application to a new provider.

1. What is QuickBooks Hosting Migration?

QuickBooks hosting migration is the process of moving QuickBooks data and software from one service provider’s cloud platform to another.

A QuickBooks hosting migration strategy generally consists of these five phases –

Image: QuickBooks Data and Application Migration – 5 Phases of Strategy

1. Existing Service Evaluation: Evaluate your existing QuickBooks cloud service. What is the business case that drives your migration to the new cloud provider?
2. Search for New Provider: Time to look for a good hosting provider if you have hosting issues such as cost, poor performance, security issues, etc.
3. New Provider Evaluation: Evaluate a new provider on various parameters such as – cost, performance, customer support, industry recognition, and understanding of your business and QuickBooks software before making a switch/migrating your QuickBooks data and applications.
4. Data Migration: If you have chosen the provider, this is the time to migrate your QuickBooks data and application from your existing provider to the newer one.
5. Execution: Finally, as QuickBooks is migrated, you learn and adopt the new platform and constantly iterate toward the new operating model.

2. Benefits of Migration

There are some common signs that indicate that it’s the time to switch to a new provider. Poor performance, security issues, not delivering on SLAs, and hidden and increased costs are some of the red flags that make businesses switch from on QuickBooks hosting provider to another.

If any of these issues sound familiar to you, then it’s the right time to migrate your QuickBooks hosting to a new provider.

Here are some typical benefits you’ll get with QuickBooks hosting migration –

➵ A good provider can help you reduce your operational costs. Affordable solutions such as pay-as-you-go pricing can be handy if the cost is an issue with the existing provider.

➵ The migration can offer you enhanced security, protection, and better access control for your QuickBooks data and application.

➵ Migrating your QuickBooks to a good provider provides you with disaster recovery, business continuity, and regular data backup services that prevent disruptions to your QuickBooks cloud service and ensures your QuickBooks is always up and running.

➵ If you are suffering from poor performance and speed issues with your existing provider’s cloud, migrating to a new provider can help you get a super-fast access to your QuickBooks application and data along with a predefined cloud uptime guarantee such as 99.99%.

➵ The cost, quality of support, and the medium (such as chat, email, or phone) by which it is delivered can significantly hamper or boost one’s cloud success. If you have poor customer service with your existing provider, don’t wait to migrate your QuickBooks to the customer-friendly provider with 24×7 available support options.

3. What To Consider When Evaluating a New Provider

When it comes down to choosing the best hosting provider, I’d recommend asking these few questions to the new QuickBooks host –

1. What do you know about hosting QuickBooks? Are you an Intuit authorized hosting provider?
2. If my business grows – users, applications, is it hard to change plans? Can your cloud hosting scale up to meet my business needs?
3. Who can see my QuickBooks data? Who’ll have the access to my data?
4. How secure is my QuickBooks application and data on your cloud?
5. Where is my data actually stored geographically?
6. What service uptime do you commit to?
7. Does your cloud service offer pay-as-you-go plan? What are pricing structures and special offers for my business?
8. How secure is your cloud? What happens if I lose my data?
9. What customer support services do you offer? How will you provide me help (not just knowledgebase articles) if I really get stuck?
10. Do you offer business continuity and disaster recovery services with your hosting plan?

4. Formulate a Migration Strategy

Transitioning to the cloud of the new provider may present the usual IT issues, such as interoperability, data integrity, and QuickBooks data and application portability. But with early planning, businesses can outline a plan about how they’ll approach the migration process.

While most QuickBooks hosting provider makes it easy to migrate QuickBooks data and application to their platform, however, the process is not simple because two cloud environments may not be alike.

Let’s take a look at some important things that you should consider during the QuickBooks migration process.

a) Application and Data Portability

On-boarding to a new provider requires portability and interoperability of your QuickBooks application and data that can be moved to the new cloud environment. Simply put, portability means that you can access your data and application across different cloud platforms.

On the other hand, interoperability refers to the seamless integration, support, and working of your application with the cloud and different applications and add-ons.

So, before migration, always make sure to ask your provider about the data and application portability and integration with other applications offered. Assess your existing configuration and identify what data, applications other than QuickBooks to migrate to the new cloud provider.

b) Customer Support

While a lot of cloud functionalities don’t require support because the cloud is always projected as easy to use and “self-service” technology, but, there are still many scenarios where a customer wants assistance and instant solution for a problem from a cloud service provider.

Assistance is required before, during, and after migrating QuickBooks from one provider to another. It could be on setting new user permissions, integrating QuickBooks with other applications, setting printers with QuickBooks, etc.

Make sure that your new provider is available 24×7 to support you via chat, email, phone, or any other medium on which you want to connect with them.

Do they have Knowledge Base or other documentation to search for a solution? What so their existing clients say about their customer service? The answers to these questions can ensure that you are not helpless when you need support.

c) Service Uptime

Service uptime simply refers to the amount of time that the QuickBooks application hosted by a service provider is accessible to you. Cloud service availability is usually expressed as a percentage of uptime in a given year.

The following table shows the downtime that will be allowed for a particular percentage of the availability i.e., corresponding amount of time your QuickBooks hosting service would be unavailable.

Credit: Wikipedia

When migrating to the new provider, make sure to ask the following question about service uptime –

• How fast will my QuickBooks and other applications work on the cloud when it is up and running?
• What is guaranteed service uptime? (Always look for a cloud provider with 99.99% or above uptime)
• What happens if cloud service goes down? Do you have any backup servers?
• Is scheduled maintenance included in the uptime guarantee?
• Does your SLA include all your actions that you will take for service downtime? Are there any uptime rewards in the service agreement?

d) Costs

Migrating to the new provider can also mean added costs, but, in reality, these costs wouldn’t necessarily prevent businesses from moving a bad provider to the good provider given the positive impact that migration will have on the overall business.

Make sure to ask your provider about the migration costs – Is the QuickBooks hosting migration free of cost or they charge for it? What special offer do they have for your business? Do they offer pay-as-you-go pricing model to suit your workload?

It’s important to remember that most of the cloud pricing plans are based on the computing workload – storage, resources such as CPU, RAM, security and backup options, and licensing, etc. It’s always recommended that your SLA must specify cloud service cost, maintenance, and other charges and the cost to discontinue using the service.

e) Security

Finding out a good solution for the security of your data while migrating from one provider to another, can be challenging. Data breaches, unsecured interfaces, and cloud platform privacy breach and data loss are some of the major issues that one should consider while migrating their QuickBooks data to the new provider.

Incorporating the following security measures will ensure QuickBooks applications and data protected from unauthorized access.

• Ask your provider what kind of access control, privacy protection, and security control such as firewall, encryption, authentication system, etc. they have in place.
• Know what you are responsible for.
• Know who has access to your data and application.
• Know their disaster recovery plan in case something bad happens.

Always remember that long-term success with the QuickBooks cloud hosting migration requires detailed analysis to determining the needs of existing and planned workloads, the best, most cost-effective and reliable hosting providers, and locations for hosting data and applications, and customer support available.

5. Why Choose Ace Cloud Hosting QuickBooks Hosting Migration Service

At Ace Cloud Hosting, we assess your business requirements and identify which cloud solutions are best-suited to your QuickBooks data and application to deliver the highest return on investment. By understanding the dynamics of your business, Ace Cloud Hosting’s cloud migration consultants can help you achieve extraordinary value at every step on your cloud journey.

As an Intuit authorized commercial hosting provider, we deliver a 99.99% uptime guarantee along with secure hosting of your QuickBooks data and application on our US-based data servers.

We also provide a 45-day rolling backup with business continuity and disaster recovery solutions. Your business data is stored at multiple locations in geographically isolated data centers. Therefore, even if one of the servers is down, you can easily retrieve information from another data center.

Our super-fast, reliable and an affordable service speaks for us – we are User Favorite Award Winner for Best Application Hosting Provider in Accountex USA, Great User Experience Award 2018 by FinancesOnline, and 2019 K2 Quality Award for Customer Satisfaction.

Speak to a QuickBooks hosting specialist today – 855-980-2150.