MCP servers, AI assistants with real tools, and what hosting an MCP endpoint actually involves.
The Model Context Protocol is how an AI assistant stops being a chat window and starts being able to do things: read a mailbox, book a meeting, look something up in a system you already own. An MCP server is what provides those tools, and a remote one is an ordinary piece of infrastructure with some unusual demands. These articles cover MCP from the hosting side: why a streaming endpoint needs a reverse proxy you control, what a long-lived connection pool costs in memory, and the security work that comes with holding credentials that are not yours. We build and run one ourselves, so the figures here are measured rather than estimated.
Every host says it runs on its own hosting. Almost none show the invoice, the config decisions or the mistakes. Two 365i products, five things the unmanaged image did not do on first boot, an upsell we talked ourselves out of, and a mailbox calendar finding that would otherwise have arrived as a support ticket.
