Claris offer this, but it seems very expensive at 900€ per User per year - can anyone recommend any other companies?

 

Claris FileMaker Cloud hosting includes the FileMaker license.

 

Alternatively you could try FMCloud: https://www.fmcloud.fm

We’ve used Oditech.com for a long while, and can recommend them. Note with FM 19 you will have to have a dedicated server, and also BYOL. 
 

 

The issue seems to be that Filemaker (now Claris) has moved away from supporting the Small Business i.e. 1-10 Users and is forcing people to have dedicated servers with expensive licensing costs.  Companies are stuck at version 16 of Filemaker, hosted on Server v14 to have shared access for businesses of up to 5 Users and cannot benefit from the improvements in Filemaker. 

We all know that disc space i.e. storage costs are peanuts compared to 20 years ago, and the small businesses dont need GBs of space anyway.  Very surprised nobody has yet offered to split or share a Server facility - would have thought this is an option if DBs are encrypted so cant be read by another company or person.

It will be a shame to have to ditch Filemaker purely because the small guy is no longer supported - IMO.

Yeah, that’s essentially the situation we are in. The dedicated server and the licensing costs are overkill for our business. But FM is a key technology our legal practice uses, so we suck it up. I think that going with Claris hosting would be a bit cheaper than with ODI, but Oditech has provided us with amazing technical support over the years — near instantaneous — and a lot of handholding when setting things up. So the incremental cost in staying with them is well worth it.