There is little doubt the best option for Act! users is to move to Act! Premium Cloud (APC). This platform is fast and modern and is where Act!'s primary development focus will be for the foreseeable future, including the new Outlook integration, Linktivity bundlings, and webhooks being introduced in the next few months. To put it simply, the future of Act! is APC, which is why so many of our existing subscribers are migrating to this new platform.

The one hiccup for self-hosted customers looking to make this move is the volume of their attachments. APC includes only 6GB of storage with their two hosted offerings, and overage fees are $60/year for every 4GB after that. This means a database with 20GB of total storage could cost $240 USD in overages annually, which will only increase over time.
Now we normally recommend customers do maintenance on their database to remove old Histories and Documents beforehand, or create an archive database and go to APC with a lean version of their production database, but that isn't always possible. Some users are either unwilling or unable to part with their Histories for compliance reasons and are therefore faced with a costly barrier to entry to APC.
It is for this reason that we've developed Attachments4act.

The purpose of Attachment4act is simple. It works to redistribute your database attachments in one of two ways. First, it scans for orphaned attachments that are no longer connected to your database, but still are taking up space. These orphaned attachments are either moved to a separate directory or deleted outright. In tests on our database, we cleaned up one-third of the attachments and immediately trimmed almost 5GB's of fat.
The second is to relocate them to network share or an online public storage service called www.BackBlaze.com. In both cases, the attachments are replaced with a shortcut - a URL for BackBlaze and a UNC for a  network share. Local shares obviously couldn't be accessible via the web like files stored on BackBlaze, but that isn't always a requirement for some teams. 

Attachments4act has several big advantages over the traditional method of uploading databases with all their attachments:

1. Trimming the fat: Attachments4act offers several utilities to trim the fat from your database. Remove orphaned attachments to help keep you from paying to store files you'll never use. We also have tools for removing images from your Histories, and stripping out unneeded HTML that can bloat the size of your database
   
   
2. Cheaper Storage: As for the rest of your attachments, BackBlaze.com offers the first 10GB for free, and only $6/month for one terabyte of data storage. For context, APC charges $5/month for only 4 GB of storage, compared to BackBlaze charging $1 more for almost 250x the storage. If you're relocating files to a share behind a firewall there is obviously no charge at all. This setup is ideal for small teams on the same network that won't need access to attachments from the web.
   And BackBlaze is also remarkably cheap compared to other online data storage services. See the chart below (click to enlarge):
   
3. Improved Ease & Speed of Deployment: Smaller databases are easier & faster to upload to APC, and then distribute RDBs to new users after the initial deployment. Users with 15GB databases or more could end up waiting until the next day to have their database provisioned because of the longer upload and processing time. Also, databases under 2GB can be much more successfully created autonomously from the APC web interface due to memory limits inherent in their hosting technology.
   
   
4. Real-time access: Shared attachments stored in either BackBlaze or a network share are managed in real time. Any changes made to them would instantly be available to the other users, which is not the case in a sync environment.
   
   
5. Data Security: By storing attachments in BackBlaze, users have the security of a trusted infrastructure, but also the comfort of knowing they're being synched to the account holder's computer, as well, for additional fault tolerance.
   
   
6. Flexibility: Attachments4act has a number of configurable options, one of which allows you to select the history type you wish to migrate. 

While Attachments4act will be available commercially for a one-time fee of $150 USD (limited to a maximum of three unique database migrations), Keystroke customers with Orange Care who are migrating to Act! Premium Cloud will get it free of charge. That's right, FREE OF CHARGE for Orange Care subscribers. Each one will get a 14-day license of Attachments4act, during which time they can migrate all their attachments and then upload their new leaner database to us for APC provisioning.

The program is easy to use and can save our customers hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars annually.