Managed Hosting: The Ultimate Guide

When compared to regular managed hosting, fully managed hosting provides an additional layer of abilities and expertise that simply just is out of the scope of work that managed support can provide.

Fully Managed hosting is better in every way, and here's why:

Managed support serves to provide a basic level of support for a server's initial setup and/or migration of services from a different server.
Fully Managed support aims to provide a comprehensive level of support that extends past initial setup and tends to be useful throughout the usage of the server.

Even with initial setup, usually the list of items that managed support is willing to help with is quite basic - a simple install of a popular application stack, general first-time setup of a database, and helping migrate websites through a file transfer or a control panel backup and restore.

Fully Managed support goes well past that. Not only do they perform all of the above, but they also can handle installation of more complex applications (such as Magento or ERPNext) that require more knowledge to be done correctly. On top of that, fully managed support can also migrate existing installations of complex applications over to your new server without issue.

Managed support is useful for beginners, however its usefulness rarely extends past initial setup if problems start showing up after setup is done.
Fully Managed support on the other hand is designed to be useful for beginners, enterprise-level users, and anyone in between - its purpose goes into supporting the services and software/applications on the server throughout the entire lifetime of the server being hosted.

Say for example your Magento service suddenly stops working after you install a plugin, and now you need help with finding the root cause of the issue. Is the plugin causing an issue, or did the plugin expose a different issue with your Magento website? With managed hosting, they won't look into dealing with the problem for you. 

Instead, with fully managed hosting, we'll look into your Magento installation and debug the problem, and ultimately provide you with a diagnosis on why the problem is occurring. If it is something related to your Magento install, we'll do our best to fix the problem for you. If the issue is related to the plugin you installed for example, we'll let you know what the issue is with the plugin so that you can get in touch with the plugin developer and look into solving the problem. 

With almost all hosting providers, and typically with other managed hosting providers, you, your server and its services are not much more than a statistic to the hosting provider. They don't pay attention to who the user is, they don't focus on past support interactions and what was done previously to your server, and they don't put in the effort to make your support experience personalized.

Our goal is to give you a support experience akin to having your own personal IT department. As time passes and you use our support system for various issues and requests on your server, we'll be able to keep track of what was done and make sure that we don't overlap or recommend actions that were already tried or implement solutions that were already implemented. Instead, we do everything we can to give you a unique support experience that looks after your server and its services as individually as possible.

Using a Fully Managed VPS provides you with an unbeatable support experience that Managed hosting can't even compare to.

Fully Managed and Managed are only really comparable in name only. Managed support is very surface-level support in comparison to fully managed hosting. It all comes down to how in-depth the support experience is. Would the support team be willing to find the cause of the issue in your stack not loading? Or would the support team attempt to migrate all of your services, non-standard website setups and databases from your existing hosting provider, all completely for free? All of the above is something that simply doesn't exist anywhere else. 

Fully Managed servers, when used in an applicable environment, can actually end up paying for itself over time. Instead of needing to hire technical support to handle problems with the server's dependencies or performing maintenance on the system (disk usage cleanup, malware scans, etc.), all of the expenses associated with that are nullified when the VPS is Fully Managed.

The support isn't paid per-incident, either - there's no limit to the number of times that Fully Managed support can be used. Whether it's once a year or three times a day, we're here to help out as much as possible.

It's important to remember that unmanaged hosting (or even managed hosting) has features that usually need to be paid extra for, that are included with fully managed hosting. For example, data migrations - you may get one or two free migrations with a managed hosting provider, whereas a fully managed hosting provider can migrate an unlimited number of websites and services, and make sure that everything is set up as identically as possible, regardless of the amount of data being migrated.

In fact, the support isn't paid extra, period. Our support can be used an unlimited number of times, at any point, for free.
Simple as that.

Managing your own servers is time consuming, mentally labor-intensive at times, and most of all requires technical experience for both the operating system as well as the software stacks that run on it. Instead of running your servers on a fully managed Linux hosting provider, you decide to hire a dedicated IT person that has the knowledge and experience to run your services. The issue is, the cost reduction of running an unmanaged server is heavily outweighed by having to hire your own support team. Additionally, by outsourcing support, you also lose the vertical integration that is only possible through a fully managed hosting company. 

By using a fully managed hosting service, you'll get a team of experts that are experienced in several operating systems as well as a variety of software stacks designed to run on them. With our fully managed support, we will thoroughly cover your entire hosting stack from top to bottom. We'll do support on the data center, the server hardware, the low-level infrastructure that your operating system depends on, the operating system itself, and then on top of that we also do support for the services that you run on your server, including third-party services that you or we install on your server. This ensures that all aspects of your hosting are treated equally and gets the same level of attention that you would expect from a comprehensive support solution.

There are several fully managed hosting providers to choose from nowadays - some include it for free, while others charge hundreds of dollars a month for the privilege.

It's important to know that while they share the same name, not all fully managed hosting providers are able to provide the level of support that is expected from a fully managed support service.

When choosing a hosting provider with fully managed support, it's important to look at the list of tasks they're willing to do. Additionally, asking their support team directly whether they're able to support the applications or platform that you use is a great way to find out which fully managed hosting is not really fully managed.

A fully managed hosting provider should be able to provide support for almost any application that can run on the server. This would include installation, helping make sure the base application is working, as well as migrating any existing content from an existing installation elsewhere.

It's important to note that fully managed support doesn't necessarily provide in-depth support related to the content inside of the application. That area is usually out of the scope that even fully managed support covers since that is user-specific data and content, and is not part of the application itself.

While not every case can be covered, we still provide you with a much broader range of support and stacks that are supported, which is far more than regular managed support, and is not even covered in any way by unmanaged hosting.

While we strive and focus on providing the best fully managed servers in the industry, there is no guarantee that we'll be able to fix a problem that is unable to be identified or solved. We however will always give our best effort in attempting to fix the issue while taking any precautions necessary.