The QuickBooks hosting market is booming, and accompanying this increase in demand is an increase in the number of companies offering their hosting services. But which ones deserve your business—and how do you choose between them?

There are a number of factors to consider when you’re trying to figure out whether or not a QuickBooks hosting service provider has what your business needs. Here are some important things to look for when you’re making comparisons between companies—and some insight into how NovelASPect stacks up to the competition:

• Uptime. The anytime, anywhere access that makes QuickBooks hosting so appealing is only useful to you if you truly can get to your information anytime you need it. Before you sign up for a hosting company’s services, ask them how often their servers go down, and for how long at a time. A company should also guarantee a minimum uptime percentage in the service agreement they sign with you.

          *How NovelASPect measures up: NovelASPect offers 99.9% uptime,
            guaranteed.

• Data Security and Disaster Recovery. Concerns about data security are the primary reason that QuickBooks hosting didn’t take off even faster than it has, and understandably so—the data you input is sensitive, and you can’t afford to take any risks with it. Make sure you choose a company that takes every security precaution possible, including password-protected logins, encryption, time-outs, and server redundancy.

          *How NovelASPect measures up: At NovelASPect, we automatically perform
            a daily backup of our servers to an offsite location, and our Internet Backbone
            is an international, fully redundant OC192 (10,000Mbps). With two-level-
            strong, password-protected logins, 128-bit encryption, and security
            time-outs—not to mention biometric identification and fully escorted access
            requirements at our data center—we provide the highest level of data security
            possible.

• Are they an Intuit Hosting Partner? In order to partner with Intuit, a company’s facilities, technology, and services must all undergo a rigorous review process. Only those companies found to be secure, private, and reliable are granted accreditation and entry to Intuit’s Commercial Hosting Program. Choosing a company that has met these standards is a smart, easy way to ensure that you’re signing on for quality services.

           *How NovelASPect measures up: NovelASPect became one of the select
            QuickBooks hosting providers to be approved as a partner by Intuit at the
            beginning of this year.

• Cost. When it comes to QuickBooks hosting, prices range pretty far and wide. To a certain extent, higher cost can mean higher quality—but that’s not always the case. The best policy is to compare at least a few companies’ prices side by side, taking into account the difference in the service they’re offering, and keep an eye out for hidden costs that will jack up the final price tag. Most good companies will also offer a free trial.

           *How NovelASPect measures up: NovelASPect offers premium services at
            extremely competitive prices. We offer Citrix hosting at a lower cost than what
            many lower-quality terminal services providers charge, with no setup fees or
            hidden expenses.

The list goes on, but these are some of the most important considerations that you should take into account when you’re looking for a reliable, quality QuickBooks host. Every vendor has something different to offer; the trick is to find the one that offers everything. NovelASPect is that company—and if you’re not convinced, what do you have to lose by giving our free trial a shot?

Last week, Joe Woodard—an expert in the field of QuickBooks Hosting, use and support—wrote an interesting piece on the future of Intuit for the online tax and accounting news website Accounting Today. Woodard is the president of Creative Financial Software (CFS), a company that provides QuickBooks implementation, training, and consultation services for small businesses, and he has a lot to say about what Intuit is doing now and what it should do going forward in order to maintain its position as the leading company in SMB accounting technology.

In his article, “Projecting the Intuit QuickBooks World of Tomorrow,” Woodard argues that Intuit’s decision to partner with hosting companies (like NovelASPect) rather than to offer QuickBooks hosting services directly is the right one. For one, he says, Intuit’s core business model does not include hosting—and there’s no reason that it should right now. The technology is already completely developed and is readily available within the market, he explains, and Intuit’s decision to forge partnerships with the strongest hosting companies out there means that rather than insisting upon building its own hosting capabilities (thereby delaying access for its clients), they’ve already managed to make QuickBooks hosting the mainstay of their cloud strategy—a move that has not only benefited Intuit, but its customers as well.

As one of the companies that has been approved by Intuit as a hosting partner, we’ve seen firsthand at NovelASPect how beneficial their program has been for everyone involved. For one, NovelASPect employs a third-party company, MSPAlliance, to review companies and ensure that their facilities, technology, and services are secure, private, and reliable before granting them accreditation and entry to the Commercial Hosting Program. Not only does this give clients peace of mind, it rewards those companies that have worked hard to build and maintain a safe, secure hosting environment by allowing us to announce ourselves as authorized Intuit partners.

In addition to Intuit, we also partner with Citrix, whose technology enables us to provide a more scalable, on-demand computing model. With our Intuit partnership alone, we would be able to provide our customers with full anytime, anywhere access to their QuickBooks data; with our Citrix platform, we are able to offer our clients all of that plus an incredible amount of IT control and flexibility. At the end of the day, this translates into increased productivity and reduced expenses for our clients.

Since day one, NovelASPect has been changing the way small businesses access data around the world, and that continues to be our mission. As long as we’re here, we’ll keep on growing and evolving to meet the needs of our current and future users.

(To see what else Joe Woodard has to say about the future of Intuit, you can read the full article discussed above here.)