Cloud & Microsoft 365
Cloud & Data Centre Services
Servers, somewhere sensible.
Cloud and data centre services means running your servers somewhere other than a cupboard in your office: in a Canadian data centre, in a public cloud, or split between both. happier IT designs, hosts and manages that for organizations of roughly 15 to 200 people.
Who it's for
The four arrangements, and who each suits.
No arrangement is correct in general, only correct for your applications, your connection and your budget.
Virtual servers, hosted
Your servers run on someone else’s hardware, managed as if they were yours. For applications that need a real server but not a real room.
Colocation
You own the equipment; the facility provides space, power, cooling and connectivity. Suits recent hardware or a licence tied to specific machines.
Public cloud
Microsoft Azure and its equivalents. Strongest where demand varies and you want to pay for what you use. Weakest as a place to park an old server unchanged.
Hybrid, which is what most people have
Email and files in Microsoft 365, an application or two hosted, and something on site because a machine requires it. Worth designing on purpose.
What's included
What we handle, and what we tell you first.
The design decisions matter more than the hardware.
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Deciding what moves and what stays
Some systems are better where they are: equipment controllers, anything needing a local licence dongle, a site with poor internet. We say so rather than moving everything for tidiness.
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Canadian hosting and data residency
Where your data physically sits, in writing, per system. It comes up in client contracts and privacy reviews, and “probably Canada” is not an answer.
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Honest sizing
A server specified twice the size it needs bills every month for years. We size from measured load.
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The connection, treated as infrastructure
Hosted servers are only as good as the link to them, which usually means a second internet path.
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Patching, monitoring and capacity
Hosting a server elsewhere does not manage it, that is a separate job. Updates on a schedule, and someone reading the alerts.
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The exit, written down at the start
What it would cost and take to leave: notice periods, data extraction, egress fees, and who holds the licences.
How it works
How a move gets decided.
Two of these three steps happen before anything is bought.
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Inventory and measurement
Every server, application and dependency, with real usage rather than stated requirements.
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Options, costed over five years
Hosted, colocated, public cloud or staying put, each with the monthly figure, the one-off figure and the exit figure. Cloud is not automatically cheaper, and five years is where that shows.
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Move, verify, then decommission
Migration in stages with a tested back-out, verification that each application behaves, then removing the old equipment.
What it costs
What it costs, and the cost nobody mentions.
Hosting is priced predictably. The number that surprises people arrives later, when they want to leave.
Hosted virtual servers are billed monthly on the resources they use: processor, memory, storage and backup. Colocation is billed on rack space and power. Public cloud bills per resource per hour, which is excellent when usage varies and expensive when a server simply runs all the time.
Egress fees are the charge for moving your data out of a platform. Storing it is cheap; reading it back at volume is not, so a full recovery or a migration away can carry a bill nobody budgeted for.
happier IT’s management fee is quoted per environment after the inventory step, never before it. Which Canadian facilities we host in: Vancouver and Quebec.
On “the cloud is cheaper”
Sometimes. A steady workload running all day is often cheaper on a hosted server than in a public cloud, and the reverse holds for anything that varies.
We will show you both numbers, including when the answer is to keep what you have.
Why us for this
Canadian, and specific about it.
happier IT is Canadian-owned and operates its own security operations centre in Canada, staffed by our own employees. For hosting, the question clients actually ask is narrower: which building, which city, and who can physically reach the equipment.
Facility details: Vancouver and Quebec. Certifications: our awards and certifications page has the full list.
Go deeper
- Backup and disaster recovery Recovery targets, and testing them.
- Microsoft 365 management For email, files and collaboration.
- IT strategy and vCIO The budget these decisions sit inside.
Questions
What people ask before they sign anything.
Is our data in Canada if we use your hosting?
It can be, and it is answerable per system rather than in general. The question matters when a client contract or an insurer asks where personal information is stored. A Canadian provider does not automatically mean Canadian storage, so the question to ask is which facility, in which city. We put that in writing.
What are egress fees?
Egress fees are what a platform charges to move your data out of it. Storage is usually cheap; pulling large volumes back across the internet is not. They matter in two moments: a full recovery after a failure, and a migration to a different provider.
Do we have to move everything at once?
No, and staging it is usually cheaper. The common pattern is to move whatever has the fewest dependencies first, prove the design and the connection with it, then schedule the rest around quiet periods. What is worth avoiding is a long half-finished state nobody intended, so agree a date for the final piece while you are planning the first.
What is the difference between colocation and hosting?
With colocation you own the hardware and rent the space, power and connectivity around it, so replacements and warranties stay yours. With hosting, the provider owns the hardware and you pay monthly for capacity, so refresh cycles stop being your problem.
What happens if we want to leave?
You get your data and your systems, and we help with the handover. Practically that means a notice period, an agreed extraction format, any egress charges, and clarity on which licences are yours. We would rather write it into the agreement at the start than negotiate during a departure.
Related
Where to go next.
In this service
Related services
Worth reading
Want to know what this would look like for you?
A 30-minute call. No slides, no audit fee, no obligation. We ask what is breaking and tell you honestly whether we are the right fit.