Act! Database Maintenance in the Cloud

Act! that used to open in a second starts taking ten. A lookup that was instant now hangs. Every so often a sync fails or an error pops up that a restart clears, until it does not. These are rarely random. They are usually an Act! database that has not been maintained, and the fix is upkeep rather than a new CRM. Act! database hosting puts that upkeep in the hands of the people running the server, so the maintenance a database needs actually happens instead of waiting for someone to remember it.

Why an Act! database needs maintenance

Act! Premium stores your contacts, history, and activities in a Microsoft SQL Server database, and like any database, it does not stay in perfect shape on its own. Records accumulate, indexes fragment, and the file grows. Over months and years, that shows up as slower lookups, longer load times, and the occasional integrity issue. None of it means Act! is failing; it means the database is doing what databases do without regular care. The good news is that Act! includes the tools to keep it healthy. The catch is that someone has to run them on a schedule, and in a lot of offices nobody owns that task until something breaks.

A few signs tend to show up first: Act! taking longer to open, lookups and reports that used to be instant starting to lag, remote sync errors that keep recurring, or a database file that has grown unusually large. Any of those is worth a maintenance pass before it turns into a harder problem.

What Act! database maintenance involves

Keeping an Act! database in good shape comes down to a handful of recurring tasks. How often depends on how heavily the database is used, though Act! suggests running maintenance at least weekly, with a daily backup alongside it as a sensible baseline for an active database.

The problem with doing it yourself

None of these tasks is difficult. The difficulty is consistency. Check and Repair only helps if it runs regularly, backups only help if they are scheduled and tested, and SQL upkeep only happens if someone is watching the server. In a small office, that someone is usually a staff member doing it between other work, or nobody at all. The database runs fine for a long time, which is exactly what lulls a business into ignoring it, and then the slowdown or the corrupt record arrives at the worst possible moment. Self-managed Act! maintenance is less a skills problem than a whose-job-is-it problem. And when a neglected database finally corrupts, recovery is not always simple. Depending on the damage, it can mean restoring from a backup and losing recent work, or paying for specialist repair, either of which costs far more than the routine upkeep would have.

How hosting handles it

When your Act! runs in a hosted environment, the database lives on a managed SQL Server that the host maintains. Backups are scheduled and monitored, the SQL Server is patched and kept current, and database maintenance becomes part of running the service rather than a task on someone’s overdue list. Your team still uses Act! exactly as before, the difference is that the upkeep underneath it is handled, so the database stays fast and intact without anyone in your office having to own it. Because the host watches the server rather than waiting for a complaint, issues like a failing backup or a database growing too fast tend to get caught early, before they reach your users. For a business that depends on Act! but has no IT person watching the database, that is the main reason to host it. You can see how it works on our Act! hosting page, and if you are moving an existing database, our note on Act! migration covers that side.

Act! database questions