Financial viability: Many ASPs are start-up businesses living off investment capital. As with any new businesses, their survival rate is low. The best bet is businesses that already have adequate revenue, perhaps from some other source.
Adequate infrastructure: It's easy to put up a service on the Internet. A hardware/software platform (excluding the application software) can cost under $10,000. But that doesn't mean it's a viable service. Adequate servers, database engines, and technical architecture have to be commercial grade and scalable to provide a real commercial service.
Security: The Internet is a wild and wooly place, with desperados regularly probing and sometimes attacking online services. Are adequate firewalls in place? Does the vendor provide adequate internal security? Will your data be safe from your competitors on the hosted service?
Privacy policy: If you give up your data to an ASP what will the ASP do with it? Sell it to other parties? Use it to do sales and marketing to your business partners? Read the vendor's privacy policy. Make certain it suits you.
Data accessibility: If you put data into an ASP will you be able to get it back out? How? You need more than a promise. You need to know the method, the format, and then the cost.
Service/performance level agreement: What happens if the host system is down - for a minute, hour, day, week? What happens when processing spikes slow the system to a crawl or perhaps stop it altogether? The vendor should provide a contract of expectations and penalties that make sense. But ultimately good intentions aren't enough. The vendor must have the right technical resources and staff to deliver what they promise.
Available alternatives: If you use a service and it fails or you become too frustrated, what are your alternatives? You should have a Plan B in place before you go ahead with plan A. Plan B need not be another ASP, it might be yourself.
Don't bet the farm: The safest ASPs to use are those that don't matter whether they're around or not. But optional, non-critical services may not be worth using in the first place. In any case, don't bet your agency on any ASP unless you already have significant objective evidence of their operational and business viability.
Controllable expenses: How does the ASP charge? Can you understand and control it. Can the ASP make a profit? Pricing must make sense to you and your vendor.
Fast access: If your agency staff has only dial-up, 56k access to the Internet, it's inappropriate for you to subscribe to anything but infrequently used, low data volume ASPs. Part of the cost of using an ASP is having fast Internet access. Factor that in when doing your analysis.
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