I work at an ASP, and we take our security & reliability very seriously. The contracts with our customers specify a service level that we must maintain (uptime, response time, etc). If we fail to maintain our agreed-on levels, there are financial penalties (depending on the contract). Our source code is also escrowed, just in case.
If we didn't have all this in place, we wouldn't be able to make sales to the enterprise-sized customers that we specialize in. Any ASP who doesn't have these precautions in place will have a tough time getting & keeping customers.
The good news is that with the wide acceptance of the Internet as a tool for business, we no longer have to convince people that the Internet will be there when they need it. At a previous job, we had one sales prospect who didn't understand that if he could get to Yahoo, he could get to our site. He would call us up about every other day, asking if the site was up. We'd tell him of course it was, to which he would ask "How can I check this?", and we'd say: just type in the URL. "Oh".
Chip H.
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