QuickBooks Hosting: Is Price *Really* the Most Important Factor?
Conventionally, the price was seen as the major factor that influences the buyer’s choice.
Although, recently, there has been a slight shift in the customer’s behavior towards the non-pricing factors such as reliability, security, ease of access among others.
But many studies find that price is still a determinant of the buying decision process.
81% of the people say that price is the top consideration when buying, according to a survey by EML Wildfire.
It’s true that for some people price is not an important factor, but it is one of the most important factors that affect the buying decision.
Simply put, price is actually a matter of segmentation.
While looking out for a cloud accounting solution like QuickBooks Hosting, many small accounting firms, CPAs, and accountants are also inclined towards the pricing of hosting services.
If you are running a small business or a CPA/accounting firm and looking for becoming a profitable business, you need a lot of things. From hiring the right staff, excellent customer service, to money-saving in your business, you need all these to succeed.
In this article, I’ll discuss why you should consider the price while buying QuickBooks Hosting services.
Pricing Affects Profitability
For small accounting firms, CPAs, or medium-sized businesses, the budget for purchasing a hosting service is limited and impacts the financial conditions of the business greatly.
You should look for the required features in the service provider but at the optimum price as more the price, lesser the profits.
A big enterprise might not focus more on the cost, but for small businesses, the best-case scenario would be getting the low-priced, secure, and fast processing service from the cloud hosting provider.
For SMBs, the budget and analyzing cash flow is important to make sure you are keeping on top of it.
According to US Bank, 82% of business failures are due to issues with cash flow.
Right Level Pricing Influences Brand Value
A wrong purchasing decision because of pricing can impact the normal business workflow for any small-sized business and may result in the failure of the company.
There are many QuickBooks Cloud Hosting service providers offering the lowest pricing to attract customers at initial stages of buying but lacks in after-sales services and benefits.
Hence, for long-term business growth, you should choose the hosting service provider whose pricing is at the right level and include all the benefits, value and security at the minimal cost.
You should not be looking for the cheapest or the most expensive provider but the one who best fits to your business requirements.
Pricing Creates The First Impression
It is often seen that most people notice the price as a first factor before buying, as it creates a sense of interest.
While the businesses would base their decisions on the overall functionalities and benefits of the services but rules out the high priced service providers mostly while comparing them with other cloud hosting providers.
Look for the provider who offers affordable, value-based pricing or even the tailor-made plans.
Pricing Determines Product Demand In Market
QuickBooks Accounting Software, developed by Intuit, has a large market share in the accounting industry with thousands of happy and satisfied customers, which makes it a successful solution.
Being one of the affordable accounting solutions, QuickBooks Desktop’s different versions — Pro, Premier, Enterprise, Accountant are adopted by small businesses to big enterprises.
Intuit has authorized many providers as their Commercial and Standard hosting provider for QuickBooks Desktop software. There are also some unauthorized providers who are providing managed hosting services for QuickBooks.
This nature and degree of competition in the market is also a great determinant of price as the QuickBooks hosting market is highly competitive.
You might be wondering, how much should you pay for QuickBooks Hosting services?
For small to medium-sized CPA firms, the price at which they can maximize the revenue without spending a lot, getting secure and fast processing cloud hosting environment would be the right price for QuickBooks hosting.
There are 3 kinds of services you can get: Secure, Cheap, and Fast. Mostly, you are able to get only two of them i.e. you get either -
- secure and fast but not cheap,
- fast and cheap but not secure,
- secure and cheap but slow services.
Cheap, fast or secure - no matter the option, can you pick all three?
No doubt, you desire a high-speed and high-quality QuickBooks Hosting service at a low price, there’s is only one way you can meet this need: value i.e. how much the service is worth and meets your business requirements.
If you are looking to get all these three things — Ask yourself what are your priorities?
To help you with that, I’ve compiled a list of providers, that you should be looking for hosting your QuickBooks on the cloud at affordable prices without compromising the security and ease of access.
1. Ace Cloud Hosting
Ace Cloud Hosting powered by Real Time Cloud Services LLC (RTCS), is an “Intuit” authorized commercial host for QuickBooks accounting software.
Ace Cloud Hosting earns my recommendation as they are the winner of Accountex 2016 “Best Application Hosting Provider”, “Great User Experience” and “Rising Star” award by FinancesOnline in 2018 and K2 Quality Award 2019 in “Customer Satisfaction” category.
Ace Cloud Hosting has a decade of experience in providing custom-cloud hosting solutions for accounting apps, tax software, office suites, managed and private servers to small businesses and enterprises.
With industry-specific solutions, hosting on the secure cloud environment, and USA-based data centers, Ace Cloud Hosting offers various benefits with their QuickBooks Hosting service, such as -
a) 99.999% server uptime
b) 24*7*365 chat, email, and voice support (even on weekends and holidays)
c) 100-day backup
d) 10-day free trial
e) Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
f) High-performance Computing (HPC) Servers
g) Integration with more than 200 apps
Ace Cloud Hosting is one of the lowest-priced QuickBooks cloud hosting providers with plans starting from $34/user/month to $49/user/month.
They are also offering lifetime free QuickBooks hosting (for 1 user) for CPAs and special discounts on tax application or QuickBooks cloud hosting at just $19.5/user/month for the first three months.
Check their pricing and special offers.
Note: All the data is collected from Ace Cloud Hosting website as of 7th Dec 2019.
2. Right Networks
Right Networks, LLC is an “Intuit” authorized commercial hosting provider of QuickBooks offering cloud-based solutions to accounting firms, accounting professionals, and small businesses. Right Network is a winner of the K2 Quality Prime Award 2019.
Right Networks offers following benefits with their QuickBooks Hosting service -
a) 99.999% server uptime
b) 24*7 (excluding major USA holidays or events) via phone
c) 90-day backup
d) No trial period (30 days money back policy)
e) Online user portal
Right Networks pricing plans are slightly on the higher side, starting from $57/user/month to $76.99/user/month.
Check out their pricing here.
Note: All the data is collected from Right Networks website as of 7th Dec 2019.
3. Swizznet
Swizznet is an “Intuit” authorized commercial hosting provider that offers solutions to accountants and SME’s. It uses the Citrix cloud computing technology for fast and reliable cloud access to QuickBooks accounting applications.
With its USA based technical support team, Swizznet offer benefits like-
a) 99.95% server uptime
b) 24*7 support via phone
c) 30-day backup with every 30 minutes backup
d) 15-day trial
Swizznet QuickBooks cloud hosting pricing starts from $54.99/user/month and above.
Check out their pricing here.
Note: All the data is collected from Swizznet website as of 7th Dec 2019.
In January 2019, I did research on the leading QuickBooks Hosting providers and shared some guidance on how to choose the right host for your QuickBooks application and accounting data. Check out this article.
Takeaway
Price is one of the biggest concerns for small businesses and startups, small accounting firms, accountants, but other important factors like security and performance that impact the business processes should not be avoided.
Few incidents have taken place in the past, where the major cloud hosting providers reported the ransomware attack on their servers which resulted in clients’ data loss and inaccessibility for days. [Source 1] [Source 2]
For hosting your accounting applications on the cloud, you should choose a cloud hosting provider who does not only offers the right price but also provide business continuity, high performance, and dedicated security with redundant IT infrastructure.
In the tax season 2020, you would not want to lose your critical data, billable hours, or face any difficulty in accessing the applications — any downtime may impact your business.
So choose wisely!
