One of the biggest concerns of running a hosted service is that of performance and speed.  It's a high priority here at HaveAByte.  While giants like Google have nearly mastered the art of hosting web applications for thousands of users at blistering speeds, getting that kind of performance out of a privately operated application can be difficult.  This is particularly important when your work is dependent on the system being up and responding quickly, since AyaNova is generally considered a mission critical application.

HaveAByte has always put a high priority on performance.  We've worked to ensure that our hosted AyaNova offering is as fast, and possibly even faster, than running it in a LAN environment.

Here are two speed tests to each of our data center locations, so that you can directly test the speed yourself:

Of course, those don't tell the whole story - To illustrate actual hosted AyaNova performance, watch this video:

Read more about our hosted AyaNova offering here.

Full disclosure here:

First, this really is a remote workstation, and is approximately 75 miles from the server.  It is configured the exact same way that a customer deployment would be.

PC Specs: Core 2 Duo 3.21 GHz, 2 GB RAM
Connection: Time Warner Road Runner, 2.25 megabytes/second download, 0.20 megabytes/second upload.
Browser: Chrome 4 Beta 4.0.266.0
Caching: The AyaNova demo server was recently accessed, so some caching on the server is in effect here.  But these AyaNova systems tend to be accessed fairly often, and caches aren't flushed very often on the server, so this should be pretty representative.
Dataset: This is a demo AyaNova database that doesn't have too much data, but it has been shown to scale up very well due to a lot of optimization work done by the AyaNova developers especially with large datasets.  We have several accounts with thousands of records in a single grid view, and they tend to virtually load just as fast as a grid with 50 records.
Other notes: The screen recording software slowed down the performance by approximately 5-10% (very rough guess based purely on feeling.)

The surprising thing is that this is more dependent on the workstation CPU than most people might realize.  Just because it's in a web browser doesn't mean it runs "for free".  The HTML rendering and javascript are not trivial.  In the past, we hardly noticed this since download times tended to be quite long, so even if a browser required 4 seconds to render a page, we really wouldn't be affected since it would take 8 seconds to download everything anyway, so it was always ahead of the game.  With the gobs of bandwidth many of us have available, and the more complex nature of the DHTML and Javascript involved, this has recently switched places - the local system, the browser, the javascript and DHTML rendering speed, and the local CPU all combined tend to be the limiting factors, spending more time to render content than it took to receive it.

This is one reason I strongly recommend Chrome (the betas are even better, if you can stand to run them), and using a reasonably fast PC.  It's important to run a fast browser.  A quick test of simply opening a workorder on a very low-end Netbook with a 1.6 GHz ATOM processor - a machine that struggles to even run full-screen video at times - shows that it takes under 3 seconds to open a workorder with Chrome 4, as opposed to the one second you saw here.  And it's quite clear that it is being hindered by the local CPU, not the server or bandwidth.  On the faster machine, the two are generally close to one another (it takes around the same amount of time to render the content as it does to download it).  That's really the target goal for any web application, hosted or not, for best results.

In conclusion, a hosted AyaNova 6 system with HaveAByte.com means you aren't compromising your performance in order to reduce (and largely eliminate) your IT maintenance and overhead.  Paired with our AyaNovaPanel which allows you to perform full backups at any time, and a migration path off the hosted environment at any point in the future with no penalties, if your business requires it to be run locally later on, means that going hosted has no drawbacks compared to a LAN installation.  All pros, no cons.

You save money, you save time, and you won't compromise performance to get it.