The applications like Word are on the Terminal Server right next to the File Server, so performance is really quick, and the people remotely running them can be anywhere. So what is a “hosted” terminal server? Well hosting is a term in computing where a company hosts a computer or a service in their data centre rather than the customer having to purchase and maintain their own computer. This is very common with web sites, most companies use a provider specialised in looking after web servers to host their site. With hosted terminal servers the provider – such as Your Office Anywhere – will host the server with the applications and also the data and documents in their data centre. There is also a whole bunch of other servers and services that sit alongside the terminal server to provide the whole solution.

These include licensing servers, gateways so the servers can be accessed over the Internet, brokers to help with load balancing, domain controllers to manage logons and security, as well as all the firewalls and other network paraphernalia to keep things secure. In a cloud computing environment most of these other services are shared between all the customers to keep costs down.Īnother boon to the applications all running on the terminal server is that the local users PC doesn’t need to do much, so it can be lower spec and have a much longer life.

Windows terminal services