I am looking at an in-house Exchange project. The way I have this configured for our proposed environment has active/standby in our main site, with standby/72h delayed copy databases in DR. Everything is made to be reliable and redundant and I truly believe I have a near perfect config to really do Exchange well. The bad news is that I am staring down the barrel of ~$40k to get this off the ground along with a monthly fee to my reseller/VAR who is going to help keep the system up and running (I don't have any in-house exchange experts and I don't want to patch and secure the system on my own).
Our current Exchange infrastructure is hosted by Intermedia on their legacy 2003 architecture. It is kind of terrible, slow, etc, but for the most part it has been reliable. One alternative would be to simply upgrade to their Exchange 2010 offering which includes much of the resiliency I am looking for with zero upfront cost and no real change in monthly fee. The only downside to this is that I don't get to control backups/restores and that I hate intermedia with a burning passion.
I am really struggling to find a compelling reason to move Exchange in-house and fear that despite hatred, my hosting provider may be the better choice. Does anyone have any strong feelings about hosting vs internal and which way did you go. If in-house, how did you justify it?
TL;DR: I want to bring exchange in-house instead of hosting. However, I fear that hosting may make more sense even though that isn't the answer I want to hear.
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