How Hosted FTP Services Can Save Your Business Money

By now, you've come to realize the natural benefits that FTP (file transfer protocol) offers over alternative options like Dropbox in terms of not only file sharing, but the ways in which it can dramatically increase productivity for your organization across the board. If you've chosen to implement FTP in your business, you have a few distinct options to choose from. You can decide to set everything up in-house or you can partner with a hosted FTP services provider. Exploring how a hosted FTP services provider can save your business money in a wide range of different ways is definitely worth your effort.

Hosted FTP Services vs. In-House Solutions

One of the major ways that hosted FTP services can save your business money has to do with the initial setup costs or, more appropriately, the lack thereof. When setting everything up on your own, you are responsible for everything. You have to purchase the hardware, you have to choose an operating system, you have to deploy everything and get it all up and running. This requires a huge amount of time and effort, to say nothing of the costs that you'll have to deal with up front. With a hosted provider, you have to worry about none of this - you just pick the provider you're comfortable with and, for a nominal monthly fee, they take care of the rest. The setup costs are literally $0.

Another major benefit of hosted FTP services is that they're inherently scalable - new resources can be deployed and your infrastructure can be scaled back as needed. This prevents you from needing to adjust hardware to account for new users or resource requirements and also saves you the trouble of paying for hardware that you aren't utilizing to its full capacity.

Perhaps the biggest way that hosted FTP services can save your business money, however, comes in terms of maintenance. With an in-house solution, you're responsible for fixing a problem if something goes wrong. As new vulnerabilities are discovered, you (or your IT team) have to make sure that everything is properly patched and updated. With a hosted FTP services provider, you don't have to worry about this - all maintenance is handled by the provider and you're automatically patched, up-to-date and protected at all times.

These are just a few of the many ways that hosted FTP services help save organizations just like yours time and money on a daily basis. Between the ease at which new resources can be deployed, the elimination of initial infrastructure costs and the ease of management, the decision to set things up yourself or find a hosted provider is likely an incredibly simple one.