Often while researching for a perfect web hosting provider and an appropriate web hosting package irrespective of Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting or Dedicated Server Hosting you might have come across the term “Managed Hosting” or “managed services”. This preceding brief will be guiding you on the various aspects of managed web hosting, including when you should choose for Managed Hosting and what to look for in a Managed Web Hosting Provider and Managed Web hosting Package.
What is Managed Hosting?
Simply put, managed hosting is for customers who prefer to have their web host provider manage, maintain and monitor their servers, operating system, and all the supported applications. Companies or individuals who do not have in-house team or resources to manage, monitor, maintain their server commonly choose this option along with their hosting package.
When to choose Managed Hosting?
Managed hosting is an ideal solution for mid to high-level SMBs or Enterprises. Managed hosting is an aid in managing the busy e-commerce sites and dynamic application. It provides the owner the fast, reliable and efficient management of their website or application. This helps the owners in capitalizing their core competencies leaving the hassles of server management on their web host provider. If you don’t have an expert IT team with a sound knowledge of server management then managed hosting is a right solution for you.
Types of Managed Hosting
The difference in managed service package depends on what you want with your hosting provider to manage- infrastructure or operations of your server. Hene here comes the two variants of the managed hosting
- Semi-managed hosting – Great for those companies and individuals who want to use their host provider’s support services along with managing the infrastructure. They completely feel comfortable in managing their own servers.
- Fully- managed hosting- Ideal for those with limited technical knowledge and resource to manage their own servers. Fully managed hosting allows host provider to manage both the infrastructure and operations of the server.
Advantages of Managed Server Hosting
Managed Hosting offers many advantages such as:
- As you are leveraging the managed hosting services from your web host, you just have to raise or query or concern and your web host will fix the issue for you. This helps a lot in saving your working hours in finding and resolving the issue, by this, you save a lot of time and money and can focus on your business.
- The server upgrades are really easy as the web host will be looking for adding the drives, more memory, and even cluster servers together when your website requires additional resources. Your host will be taking care of smooth migrations without any downfall.
- Most managed hosting package includes free server backups facility also. Web Host will look that your data is safeguarded from faulty drives and will configure backups at any frequency you may require.
Major factors to consider when finalizing for a Managed Hosting
First and foremost there is a need to determine whether or not your website is large enough and justifies the cost of choosing managed hosting. Other than these the other factors to evaluate are as below
- Cost
- Security
- Resource availability for upgrades and downgrades
- Technical Knowledge
- Other Add-ons like Backups and etc
- Support services offered by the web host
Now since you know all the features and advantages of Managed Hosting you can now make a wise decision when to choose for the managed hosting along with the factors to consider before finalizing your managed hosting provider. The scope of managed hosting can also vary widely among the hosting companies. Some companies offer managed hosting as an add-on to their existing cloud, VPS or dedicated packages while others include managed services on basis of the hourly rate or monthly package.