I get asked this question a lot, “Who has the cheapest SharePoint 2010 hosting?” Simply put, it depends on how many users you have. The “users” are the people who will access SharePoint. These will include your employees, sub contractors, partners, vendors, and anyone else who needs to view or upload data to your SharePoint system.

So how does the number of users affect who has the cheapest hosting? Let’s see…

Clearly we can see from the above example, that when you have fewer than 63 users, you are much better off going with a per-user pricing plan. But if you have more than 63 users, it makes sense to look at a bulk plan.

Now, how can we get our SharePoint even cheaper? It comes down to how we measure “cheap.” Hosting companies measure it in terms of setup costs (your initial investment) and the monthly plan cost (your marginal cost). But we are going to measure “cheaper” in terms of cumulative cost from the day SharePoint is made available.

Let’s see how long it takes us to rack up $1,100 in total cumulative costs. Why $1,100 you ask? Because I show in this post how you can easily install your own SharePoint system that will support 500 users for $1,100 and no monthly fees.

We can see that from a cost point, if you have under 10 users, you’re best option is to use a per-user SharePoint hosting plan. But, if you have 25 users, you are better off installing SharePoint in-house, because that will save you money compared to hosting in 11 months. That’s a measurable return on your investment to host SharePoint on premises. If you have at least 50 users, you’ll see a return on your investment in less than 6 months by hosting SharePoint internally.

Who has the cheapest SharePoint 2010 hosting? Depending on how many users you have, you may have the cheapest hosting.

Does this mean that an organization of any size is always better off hosting internally? No. There are lots of factors that go into deciding whether to host internally or outsource hosting. But you should also be aware that when you outsource your hosting, you will encounter other issues that you do not currently have with your internally hosted system.