Here is a scene we hear about often. A Celje engineering consultancy, nine people, keeps its Pantheon database, a project list and a drawings upload portal for suppliers on one tired desktop PC beneath an archive-room desk. There is no battery backup, files get copied to a USB stick roughly monthly, and the person who built it all left two years back. One morning after a July storm the PC stays dark, and suddenly everyone sees just how much of the business was hanging off it. For a firm like that, moving to a VPS usually makes sense. It is a virtual machine in a professionally run facility, with a fixed allocation of CPU, RAM and disk. Mains power, air conditioning and dead components become the host's headache, and your team logs in securely from home, office or site. What the host does not do is run the thing. You receive an empty operating system and nothing more. Everything after that, from selecting the provider and tightening security to migrating data and handling patches for years, is where we come in. Nobody from Apply ever needs to set foot in a data hall or in your building.
Ordering a VM is a two-minute job. Whether you can depend on it comes down to choices made upfront and to dull, regular upkeep afterwards.
Sometimes the honest answer is no. A lone accounting package might sit better on managed notebooks with Microsoft 365, and a big ERP might want physical hardware. We suggest a VPS when the workload, budget and headcount genuinely point to it.
Hetzner, OVHcloud or IONOS if you want low cost and few moving parts. Azure, AWS or Google Cloud in an EU region if your IT already lives in one of them. A one-page comparison lists price, traffic allowance, how support is reached and notice periods.
Fully patched OS, login by SSH key or with MFA, a firewall that blocks everything not explicitly needed, unneeded services removed and repeat failed logins banned automatically. Only then does any real data get copied in.
SQL ports, control panels and RDP are never published. Staff reach them over VPN or through an MFA gateway, so the public sees only what is meant to be public.
Resource graphs are only half the picture. A probe hosted elsewhere loads your app every sixty seconds and logs its response, which usually means we spot trouble before the first complaint arrives.
A snapshot lives with the same host, so treat it as an undo button. Each night an encrypted copy travels to a second, unrelated host, and quarterly we pull back a random file plus a database and write down how long that took.
A plain VPS is usable within days. Moving a mature application together with its database is planned for an evening, typically Tuesday to Thursday, once everyone has gone home.
Within an hour we cover what will run, how many users connect simultaneously, which licences you own and where the data is today.
The VM is created inside your account, secured, and wired into monitoring and off-site copies while it is still empty of real records.
A couple of key users test a trial copy and we fix what they find. At the agreed hour we switch over and update shortcuts on staff PCs remotely.
Logins go into your company vault, you get a short written description of the setup, and together we run one restore on screen.
The hosting account should carry your company name. Many servers are quietly registered to the agency that built a website or to a previous IT firm. Once that relationship sours, recovering logins, invoices and data turns into a long negotiation. Each VPS we set up is registered to your firm, billed to your firm, and you hold a sealed emergency login. Changing support partner later means passing on a password and a PDF, nothing more.
Generally yes, if they are set up the right way. Leaving the client on office PCs and reaching a remote database over the internet is slow and prone to breaking. Far steadier is a terminal server arrangement, where users open the program on the VPS itself. We confirm the licensing position with the vendor or your reseller.
Let the software decide. Web apps, APIs and most open source tools are at home on Linux at no licence cost. If a production or bookkeeping package insists on Windows, a Windows Server licence is required, and we price it in.
Some sell a backup add-on, yet it sits in your own account and usually on shared kit. Should that account be compromised or wiped by accident, the add-on can vanish along with it. We therefore keep an independent copy elsewhere with different credentials.
Keeping data inside the Union helps, but your controller duties stay. Sign a data processing agreement with the host and list the server in your record of processing activities. If the host belongs to a group headquartered outside the EU, read its terms on possible access from third countries. Your lawyer gives the legal view; we document location and technical measures.
You pay the host directly for the VM. Our management runs at €50 per hour plus VAT, or sits inside a plan: Start from €450 per month, Business €990 per month, Premium from €1,990 per month, VAT added in all cases.
Which software should it run, and for how many people? We will reply with a host and size suggestion and an estimate of the monthly management effort.
Enquiry received
An engineer will write back no later than the following working day. Faults that leave your staff unable to work are always looked at first.
No town by that name here. Check the letters, or settle for the nearest larger place. Our engineers work only over the internet, so Kočevje and Koper get precisely the same treatment.
