This is an intro to managed hosting with some of the ways a managed hosting provider can help your business.
Table of Contents
What’s managed hosting?
Essentially, it means that your web hosting provider will take care of your server and the services/applications on it. There are different “levels” of management: unmanaged, semi managed and fully managed. What services a provider will include in their management is totally up to them. Two different fully managed hosting providers can have different SLAs and can offer different services under their managed service. You should always contact the hosting provider you’re interested in and find out what exactly their fully managed service consists of.
All managed hosting services have a 24/7 support team, which is really handy, for both beginners and experienced web developers.
What’s the difference between unmanaged, semi-managed and fully managed hosting?
As we mentioned before, it can all vary from one host to another, but generally, these are the most common uses:
Unmanaged means that your web hosting provider won’t help you with anything on your server and websites. You’ll have to do everything yourself. This is not recommended for beginners and businesses, as managing a server requires a lot of experience and knowledge of how the underlying server system works.
Semi-managed hosting providers only offer support for some services on your server. Most commonly, those services are hardware-related, meaning that they’ll configure and monitor the actual physical server and the network. Some semi-managed providers may offer basic installation/configuration support for applications too.
Fully managed hosting is where the hosting provider takes care of everything. All the hardware, network and services on your server are supported. Some fully managed hosting providers offer a best-effort guarantee for issues that are not related to your server. Fully managed hosting is the best option for business websites and beginners, as you wouldn’t have to worry about anything on your server. All the configuration, installation, troubleshooting, monitoring, and backups will be done by your hosting provider.
Note that some fully managed hosting providers only offer VPS hosting with a control panel, without full (root) access to your server. This may be a deal breaker for you if you want to have full control over your server. Contact the hosting provider and ask them for specifics about this.
RoseHosting.com offers fully managed VPS hosting with free 24/7 support and full root access
How can managed hosting help my business?
Reduce costs
Getting a fully managed server is cheaper compared to hiring a full-time system administrator that would normally take care of your server. A fully managed hosting provider will take care of your server and websites, so there’s no need of hiring system administrators for your servers.
Improve your website
Fully managed hosting providers will optimize your server and your website, thus improving the loading speed of your website. Apart from optimizing the speed of your website, fully managed hosting providers will also secure your server and websites. This will be a tremendous help, considering how easy it is to get your website hacked and your data compromised.
According to numerous studies, people tend to leave a website if it loads slowly. You don’t want to lose customers for a slow website, especially if you can do something about it.
Save you time
Troubleshooting and fixing a problem may be fun (for some people), but it does take up a lot of your valuable time if you are not experienced. In some cases, even if you are experienced, an issue will still take a lot of time to fix. Besides saving you money, a hosting provider will save you time too. Having a fully managed hosting provider with 24/7 support will help you save your valuable time. Instead of troubleshooting and fixing issues yourself, you can just contact the managed 24/7 support team and let them do it for you. Contacting someone takes a couple of minutes, where fixing an issue yourself can take a couple of hours. On the plus side, quality managed hosting providers have expert system administrators working on your server, so they’ll take care of your issues pretty fast.
So where can I find a managed host?
You are looking at one! We at RoseHosting have been offering Ultra-Fast VPS hosting since 2001. All our hosting plans are fully managed with free 24/7 support. We also offer free website migration if you want to switch from your current hosting provider to us. For more updates, you can also read our post about What are the Key Advantages of Managed Hosting for Small Businesses?.
“Troubleshooting and fixing a problem may be fun (for some people), but it does take up a lot of your valuable time if you are not experienced. In some cases, even if you are experienced, an issue will still take a lot of time to fix. ” I agree. Even with years of experience, sometimes it can be a pain dealing with problems that may take too much time. Good thing managed hosting provides the back end support so you don’t have to worry about server issues and the like!