Hi all - I'm being asked for information on what it would entail if we wanted to consider switching from RAMP to self-hosting. I've done a search of the site and the forums, and maybe I'm just searching for the wrong things, but I can't really find any solid information. What I'm mainly looking to know is how much it would be estimated to cost, and a general idea of the additional staff we'd need to hire. If anyone has a little time and would be willing to post some details here or talk through it with me directly, I'd very much appreciate it! Thanks in advance.
Depends upon you're current staff and what you can repurpose them to do, but you basically need a Windows-trained sysadmin, a backup sysadmin and a DBA. These roles are not necessarily full-time, but it is unlikely that you have any staff currently twiddling their thumbs about 4 hours a day. When we were self-hosted we had:
I'd say the roles took up half of the System Administrator's time, about a quarter of my time, and maybe 10-20% time for Help Desk and the Director. The upgrade schedule could increase this in some years.
Now, we had physical machines we had to provision and house: I don't know how the cost compares to using a virtual service such as Amazon or Azure, or how that affects downtime. Comparing the two, I'd say that in light of all the major problems last year, our downtime between RAMP and self-hosting was actually comparable in raw hours. The difference was that our RAMP outages have generally been brief (with some up to few hours last year) while our self-hosted outages were typically fewer, but catastrophic, like that one time a storm drain backed up and flooded our server room.