>>>Not sure about the price. It depends on the configuration and the number of users.
>>>It's a huge technical shift to go from the LAN to the cloud, however.
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>>Really? Doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to me -- change a few connection settings and you're done??? I'd say I'm obviously missing some key parts of the puzzle lol.
>
>To me it does look simple - it's just a migration to a different server. The trouble is pretty much the same, mostly administrative - setting the rights for everything just right, plus any replication options (which I never did, so can't say). Usually it happens that the in-house techs, or whichever third party is hired for the task, does it by the book, and the book doesn't have the SQL chapter, so they leave practically everything at default. SQL being a M$ product, most of the defaults are wrong and the dialogs change every couple of years. I've even seen one outright dangerous option in the dialog generating backup script in SSMS 2014 (or 16), on by default, which left me with a locked database. Luckily, I already had a fresh copy of that database so made a backup of that and restored it instead. Locked can still be dropped :).
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>But once it gets rolling, you really don't know the altitude of the server. Didn't know before either - I can see whether it's fast or not, but the distance between the server and its users can be anything. I've even had a case recently where a piece of the app had to send timestamped info to a web service, and the server was in Texas while all the users were in California - which I didn't know and thought the cause of the error was that the system clock ran on pacific time. Actually it should be on pacific time, which took some time to comprehend - the cause of the error was that the system clock wasn't on web synching, it was on manual, and the IT guy set it exactly right, with a minor error of 12 hours. Fucked up the am-pm. Which is another wrong default: servers should have 24h time format. The admins don't know whether it's day or night outside, anyway.


It takes hardware out of the discussion.
If you want more (or less) RAM or GB, you click something and you have it and your billing rate is adjusted accordingly.
That's really cool.
During the recovery process I noticed that one app was running slowly. In a couple of minutes the tech gave it more RAM and all was OK.
Peripherals remain an issue, though.
The tech spent most of his time getting peripherals to work.