When choosing a back office and support solution for their business, one of the most important aspects that sports advisors should remember is that cheaper is never better. In fact, cheaper will often mean that a disaster is just waiting to happen.

There is no doubt that the best solution for sports advisors these days can be found in Costa Rica, the country where the concept of Pay-Per-Head was originally developed. In essence, Pay-Per-Head (PPH) can be described as an offshore Sportsbook-as-a-Platform solution for sports advisors; a back office service that handles all the mechanics of wagering and even casino-style action for a set fee.

Costa Rica is home to many PPH service providers, but not all operate in the same fashion. The pioneer and leading provider, IDSca.com, provides sports advisors with turnkey websites and toll-free 800 numbers that their players can call at anytime. The website options can be tailored for branding purposes, and the call center operations from Costa Rica provide 24/7 online wagering. Most other PPH services are not able to deliver this level of service, and thus they end up slashing their PPH fees in an effort to appear competitive.

Busy sports advisors should evaluate cheap PPH offers with caution. Such offers tend to proliferate when right before the NFL playoffs begin; by the time the wildcard game is on the horizon, these sports advisors start getting complaints from their players about websites going offline and phone lines that ring endlessly without an answer. By the time Super Bowl Sunday comes around, the cheap PPH service is gone and revealed as a fly-by-night operation.

In the PPH business, you get what you pay for. With some PPH offers being as low as $3, you have to ask yourself whether the service can actually handle your business volume.

Quality and reliability do not come cheap; only the right PPH service can guarantee sports advisors that their websites and call centers will be 100 percent operational on Super Bowl Sunday, but to do this they must be able to provide real-time replcation, triple-redundant telephone and Internet connectivity, state-of-the-art equipment, and a mitigation solution to resolve any distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks.