Outsourcing IT

One thing I am struck with when I speak to friends who are in the IT world who are starting businesses is the amount of time they waste keeping their IT infrastructure up and running. They need to buy software licenses, buy servers, maintain servers, upgrade, debug, etc. All of this can become a major distraction when you are trying to run a business. I remember one trip with a client where we spent an hour in the Qantas Club trying to remotely fix an IT problem from the other side of the country, and almost missed a meeting because of this. In this case the problem was with the phone system, which is much harder to outsource, but it could just have easily been email or eCommerce that was not working.

For many years I was hosting my own web site, and email. And I was wasting a huge amount of time doing so. I then outsourced my Web Site for the grand price of $10/month. This freed me from so many problems. My life suddenly became so much simpler. Outages? What are they? Actually, there was one where there were major power problems with the hosting company, but in that same time I had far more outages than that.

Then came email. It took a LOT longer to outsource. When I did, I went for industrial strength. Rather than going for a POP or IMAP based solution, I ended up paying extra and getting an Exchange Server account. For the price of $10 per month per account I get a server running Microsoft Exchange with intelligent sync to all my devices. If I need access to an email when I am on the road, I have access to my emails from anywhere in the world from any device. I now no longer carry my laptop everywhere. In fact, I rarely carry my laptop. Normally I just use my iMac, iPad and iPhone.

Getting back to Redshift Wireless, Exchange Email will be one of the things that we implement by paying the $10 per month. Sure, this is not cheap, but it makes it so easy to work. The eCommerce and WordPress web site? They are already outsourced, and will remain that way. It leaves all of us more time to do the important things.