Managed Hosting

What is Managed Hosting?

A lot of people find it difficult to answer the question above. Even professionals find a difficulty in giving a concise answer. Managed hosting in general has something to do with web hosting providers offering additional managed services.

To simply define Managed Hosting, it is a form of Dedicated Hosting. The hosting providers or the Internet Service Providers are the owners of the servers and devices which are being leased to one client only. In Managed Hosting, the hosting provider manages the operating systems, hardware and applications. Customers have administrative access but they occasionally use it. Access to the managed hosting environment is limited.

Why Managed Hosting?

Before making up your mind to buy the services of Managed Hosting providers, you have to think through it first. If you are agreeable with the statements below, you are in the right path of moving to Managed Hosting.

• You need a dedicated server but you do not have the expertise to manage it.
• You cannot allow a server downtime in the kind of business you are in.
• You need more horsepower because your web applications are slowing down.
• You will be storing highly confidential or sensitive information.
• You need to run programs that are not supported by the Shared Hosting environment.

 Services

The following technical services are already part of the Managed Hosting services:

• Hardware set-up and configuration
• Software set-up and configuration
• Maintenance
• Hardware replacement
• Patching
• Technical support
• Updating and monitoring

Managed Hosting also supports advanced services but you have to pay an additional cost for these. These advanced services are as follows:

• Vulnerability scans
• DDoS attack mitigation
• Load balancing
• Data backups
• Firewalls
• Intrusion detection

The services listed above may vary depending on the Managed Hosting provider.

Features

The following are the features you should look for when buying Managed Hosting services:

• Fully Managed

In the Managed Hosting environment, the servers are fully managed. This means that professionals are handling all of the software upgrades, maintenance of server and configurations.

• Year round Monitoring

The connectivity, system load, memory utilization and storage availability is being monitored every day. Any issues in the service provided will be addressed and investigated immediately.

• Firewall

Firewall protects your server from hackers and the attacks that they do. In addition, the firewall also gets rid of fragmented packets and any form of traffic.

• Spam and Virus Filtering

With this add-on, your managed server will be free from the infiltration of spams and viruses. This protection will lighten the load of mailbox users in managing their daily mails. They will not anymore receive junk mail. This feature also ensures that the mails you are receiving are free from viruses.

• Software Updates

There are Managed Hosting providers that give you daily updates of any imminent threat to your software. Security measures are also deployed to ensure that your server is not having any downtime and that no viruses could penetrate your system.

• Expert Consultation

Look for Managed hosting providers that will readily and happily give you advices on issues you encounter when running your server. Confident providers with relevant experience in database administration, software development and the technological advances give you this type of feature in their packages.

• Configuration Changes

If you want features to be enabled or disabled and other configuration changes, you can enjoy this without any charges at all.

•  Performance Tuning
• Load Balancing
• RAID Storage

This feature ensures that all of your highly sensitive data have their corresponding backups in at least two or more hard drives. This will give security to the client that their data will always be available to them.

• 100% Guaranteed Hardware
• High-Availability Solutions
• Hot-swap chassis