Starting October 1, 2019, Microsoft is modifying their licensing terms related to outsourcing rights and dedicated hosted cloud services. Beginning October 1, 2019, on-premises Microsoft licenses purchased without Software Assurance cannot be deployed on dedicated hosted cloud services offered by the following “Listed Providers”: Microsoft, Alibaba, Amazon and Google. Riptide Hosting is not one of the “Listed Providers” noted above and these changes don’t apply to deployments at Riptide Hosting. You read more about theses changes here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/updated-licensing-rights-for-dedicated-cloud
Alternatively, instead of buying your own MS Volume Licenses and purchasing Software Assurance, contact Riptide Hosting to compare options using Riptide Hosting’s Microsoft licensing through the Services Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA) program. Riptide Hosting can offer MS Licenses for Windows Server, SQL Server, MS Office, and more, through the MS SPLA program on a monthly basis. Advantages to monthly MS licensing through our SPLA is that you, a) don’t need to make a large upfront perpetual licensing payment, b) you are not locked into using your licenses for a 3 or 5 year term, and c) you can increase or decrease licenses (i.e. per user RDS or MS Access licenses) on a monthly basis. All of our Windows Servers on VMs or Dedicated Servers come with Windows Server 2016 Standard Licensing built into the base price. Optional licenses include SQL Server, MS Office, Components of MS Office such as MS Access or MS Excel, and more.
TO USE YOUR OWN MICROSOFT LICENSING WITH RIPTIDE YOU MUST USE A DEDICATED SERVER. YOU CAN NOT USE YOUR OWN OFFICE OR SQL LICENSING ON OUR VMs:
Riptide Virtual Servers: We must provide all MS licensing through our MS SPLA Agreement. You can not use your own MS Licensing (i.e. SQL Server (other than free SQL Express), Office365 or other MS Licensing.
Riptide Dedicated Servers: You could use your own MS licensing on the dedicated server, or we can provide MS licensing monthly through our MS SPLA. But please note that for Office365, only certain plans will work on a RDS/terminal server which are Office365 ProPlus Standalone or Office365 Enterprise E3 and above. Office365 Business plans do not include ProPlus and will not work on a Windows RDS server.
If your users don’t need a local install of Office on the server (to do things like export reports from an application to Excel), then users might be able to just use the web based versions of Excel/Word by logging into their Microsoft account with OneDrive (or Google Docs, etc). Heavy users of Office will likely want it installed on the server but the web based versions might work fine for occasional use.
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