Well, everyone in business nowadays is well aware of SaaS or Software as a Service and Hosting or Hosted computing or thinks is aware. But in one way or another, they get mixed up when it comes to use them. Are you one of them as well? Do you find it hard to differentiate between SaaS and Hosting? They all do sound pretty similar but here with this blog we would attempt to distinguish them simple way.
There is an obvious difference between SaaS applications and Hosted applications, and that is, former is the service that you use and the latter is a product you own.
Hosted
Hosting a software ideally means purchasing your preferred software solution and then installing it at a data centre or hosting centre where your physical or virtualized server are setup. And then you can implement the solution like you do with the on-premises or at your company’s office.
Advantages
• Since you own the software, you only have to pay once beyond the maintenance, usually 15-20% depending on your software publisher. And if you fail to pay then you will just have to continue working with the current version.
• Your data is in a secure data center and with multiple copies so it get easy to recover in case disaster strikes.
• You can always bring back your application with little interruption. You can just quickly take your server and run it on your own physical hardware when needed.
Disadvantages
• Your long term hosting cost may surpass your in house non-hosted solutions’ costs.
• You can’t access your system if internet connection fails and you are offline.
• If you want to integrate other software with your presently hosted software then you have to get it supported and installed at the hosting center as it is difficult for local applications’ real time integration with hosted applications.
SaaS
In SaaS, a solution to be hosted can also be kept in cloud and you can also easily resell deployment model to end user customers as it is more scalable and can easily be replicated for new customers.
Advantages
• If you are a small developer then SaaS allows you to offer a software application to your customers at affordable prices.
• It is comparatively easy to create in house solution work in SaaS, and in addition rewriting is minimal.
• While you get data security and redundancy with SaaS as well as Hosted services, cloud provides unlimited scalability. In SaaS, software can be sold or rented.
Disadvantages
• With distributed nature of its architecture it is difficult take a cloud-hosted app and bring it on-premises.
• To take full advantage of the cloud services you need to rework on your existing applications.
• With time the transaction costs passed from company using cloud architecture through to the customer can eventually surpass on-premises solutions. Running various applications in cloud can cost more as each application often have cost of own.
To conclude, hosted applications may belong to an individual or a company while SaaS applications are usually multi-tenant. Compared to SaaS, hosted solutions may cost you more, and have its durability, reliability and scalability limited to hardware. And also another difference you most likely can experience is while performing heavy search, hosted sites might run slowly as both web server and database are run on the same machine.
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