Thanks for sharing Richard. Wonderful conceptual planning discussion. Great visual aids (the drawings). Too often we dive right-in installing switches, routers, VoIP without taking a pause before hand to consider what we want the end result to look like.
I know this is a nearly year old question. It all depends on the needs and budget of the business in question. Even though dedicated connections are expensive, you get more control over the network especially when you have many remote offices. You also typically get dedicated tech support and priority support if there's anything wrong with the circuit. But as I said, it depends on the needs of the business. A small mom and pop coffee shop with a few locations won't benefit from a dedicated connection. However, if you're talking about a large, multi-national business with many offices across the world or otherwise large companies with many branch offices, it does become important to have dedicated connections. I work in school IT support. We have 21 sites - 18 schools and 3 offices. They're all connected to a main datacenter via an AT&T metro Ethernet connection. I don't fully understand all the details, but we basically have layer 2 access to all of our devices across the district .
When you use the services of third party's; you are not managing the servers or keeping it secure. The provider is responsible for it to be up and running 24/7. Otherwise when you host it self you should take care of these mentioned points. Greetings,
A service provider is just nothing more or less then a different company which has a core business of selling services such as; mailserver (mailservices), File server ('doc' in the video), phone server, webserver (services to host your website) and many more. In this case you pay a different company and they give you for example a quick webserver panel where you can put your website files in. This means that you do not do anything technical to get te server up and running. Another example is a mailserver. You buy a domain name (domainexample.com) and storage You get a panel and can create email account such as; name1@domainexample.dom, name2@domainexample.com, etc.
