The open source digital platform CommCare enables frontline organizations to build their own custom, permanent solutions on a professionally managed foundation - at any scale, anywhere. CommCare was originally developed by Dimagi, and today has evolved into being one of the most widely deployed Global Goods in existence. 

Thousands of governments and organizations run their CommCare applications as a cloud-hosted, SaaS solution on Dimagi’s servers. This is by far the most popular for organizations using CommCare. While there are definitive benefits to hosting CommCare via the cloud, certain organizations or governments may opt to run CommCare on their own self-hosted or administered server. This may be due to a variety of reasons, including an organization’s policies or regulations.

CommCare Hosting Options

The diagram below shows the three options for CommCare Hosting.

Dimagi Cloud Hosting

Most popular, requires least technical expertise and set up. If you are interested in signing up for a Dimagi-hosted instance of CommCare, please visit our Software Pricing: CommCare Pricing Overview

Creating strong cultures of data use and enabling data use from point of service health information
systems continues to be an increasing priority as more digital health solutions are deployed. Talented
staff within the government and within partner organizations need to focus time and energy to unlock
the value of data to improve health outcomes, rather than in maintaining underlying technology systems,
in particular the underlying hosting infrastructure required for information systems to function.

Cloud technologies offer a modern, in-country solution to this challenge. With the ability to monitor
ongoing usage requirements and dynamically optimize resources to match, quick adjustments can
be made in line with unpredictable scale up pathways. This avoids situations where there are idle
resources, lengthy adjustment periods, and up front capital expenditures for static tooling that turn out
later not to be necessary.

CommCare HQ is a sophisticated, distributed software application, made up of dozens of processes and several pieces of third-party open source database software. It has been built for performance, reliability, security, and scale rather than simplicity. The vast majority of CommCare deployments use the global CommCare Cloud hosted instances of CommCare HQ via Dimagi’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. This approach removes the need for the project to manage its own CommCare instance and also guarantees service availability and access to the latest platform features and security compliance with HIPAA and SOC-2. You can read more about the security and privacy standards offered by CommCare as a cloud-hosted solution at Data Security.

As shared above, the vast majority of organizations select this option due to the ease of convenience and total cost of ownership of not running servers, etc. Advantages to leveraging cloud technology include the following.

Performance and Cost

The cloud provider market is incredibly competitive, and therefore performance has been
increasing while costs have been decreasing year over year for the same components.
Leveraging cloud technologies enable programs to utilize this curve and get greater value
over time.

Security

Cloud solution providers like CommCare specialize in managing security to a wide array of international and national standards and monitor continually for evolving threats. The cloud spreads the cost
of this expertise and research across all of the solutions they host. It would be exceptionally
costly for any one on premise hosting provider to source that security expertise for an
individual system. A white paper by Amazon Web Services outlines different factors to
consider related to data residency and cloud services.

Personnel

Server hosting and maintenance skills are often highly specialized and the labour market
for on premise IT skill sets is generally shrinking as more market share globally is shifting
to cloud-based offerings. Cloud services provide these specialized skills without the need
for individual systems to staff these challenging roles on their own. Most importantly, this
enables busy engineers to focus on program business services, rather than firefighting
esoteric server issues as infrastructure struggles to keep up with scale.

Disaster Recovery and Uptime

Planning for high availability and redundancy can be costly with on premise solutions,
whereas planning for disaster recovery is streamlined with cloud technologies and readily
available as a value added offering. This helps both to minimize outages, with straightforward
processes and procedures when an unplanned situation occurs, and also to reduce the
barriers to having an effective disaster recovery plan at all.

Latest Technologies

As new technologies come to market, cloud providers are incentivized to test them out and
migrate to them as needed, in a seamless experience that does not trigger large capital
expenses to clients. This model strengthens the sustainability and manageability of the
hosting approach.

Hybrid Hosting

Good option for organizations with specialized hosting requirements, while realizing benefits of CommCare.

Hybrid Hosting realizes the benefits of CommCare’s secure, stable and scalable platform while also permanently storing data in-country on a designated data storage server. Hybrid Hosting uses a cloud-based project space for application building, user management, synchronization and integration, while using the open-source CommCare Sync tool to keep data synchronized to an in-country database which acts as a primary data store.

You can read more about Hybrid Hosting in this linked document.

Below are some additional resources that are used in Hybrid Hosting:

• CommCare's Developer Forum

• CommCare Cloud in GitHub

On-Premise Hosting

Requires most amount of technical expertise, set-up

Numerous organizations and governments have successfully transitioned their CommCare applications from being hosted by Dimagi’s SaaS platform to an independently hosted instance of CommCare, without any required support from Dimagi.

As a note, Dimagi does not provide direct support to partners transitioning to on premise instances of CommCare. While Dimagi does not offer direct support in setting up an independent instance, we encourage you to follow these instructions yourself or in collaboration with a Managed Service Provider.

Below is guidance for organizations that are interested in transitioning their hosting to on-premise.

Transition Your CommCare Infrastructure

Dimagi has developed this guide (Transition to On Premise Hosted CommCare) to support interested organizations in transitioning their cloud-hosted CommCare applications to self-hosted and administered servers. This is written specifically for organizations who are either directly overseeing the transition between environments or are supporting a third-party (often a government). 

CommCare Cloud is Dimagi's self-hosting toolkit for deploying and maintaining CommCare servers. Below are helpful resources for utilizing CommCare Cloud: 

• CommCare Cloud Documentation

• CommCare's Developer Forum

• CommCare Cloud in GitHub