In May of this year Act! launched the new Canadian servers for Act! Premium Cloud. This was a huge development for Canadian Act! users that are in industries that require their data to be hosted domestically. For this reason, Keystroke has offered database hosting here in Canada for years, but the emergence of Act! Premium Cloud services in this country has made us question the need for this hosting in the future.

Consider these facts & numbers:

• The Act! Premium software costs $450 PUPY (per user, per year), while Act! Premium Cloud with hosting & the same software costs only $480 PUPY
• Adding hosting costs $120 PUPY, while APC includes it for only $30 PUPY more.
• APC uses Multi-Tenant Architecture (MTA) hosting servers, much faster than the Single Tenant Architecture (STA) offered by 3rd party hosting providers.
• Act! is developing all the product improvements for APC
• It's simply a better experience for Act! users to have the hybrid deployment of APC, supporting a robust API for all the latest integrations.

To make matters worse, we're facing increasing data centre costs going into 2024 that will require us to raise our hosting rates to $130 PUPY starting in January, making this offering even less competitive. It is for these reasons that we've decided to renew our Canadian data centre lease for only one more year, and advise customers with hosting renewals starting next month that they'll have three choices:

1. Switch to Act! Premium Cloud
2. Switch to our American STA hosting servers
3. Switch to self-hosting

The first and second options represent a minimal inconvenience for the customers, as we'll facilitate whatever migration choice they make. Databases can be moved without breaking the syncs, and depending on the size of their database, the process can often be primarily completed in one business day. For those switching to self-hosting, that is more difficult to predict since it'll vary based on each customer's technical & network capacities.

We've taken a lot of pride in our hosting services over the years, and it won't be easy to walk away from the Canadian infrastructure we built, but the final bit of news that pushed us in this direction was hearing Act! is planning to stand up new servers to support French Canadian versions of Act! Premium Cloud in Q4. This news removes the final justification for sustaining our hosting service in Canada, and finally allows us to offer the best Act! Cloud services to everyone in this great country.