To get your website properly running, choosing a good host is extremely important. Web hosts can be of various types and if you want your website to run with no hindrance and with a great uptime, you should choose a dedicated server or VPS hosting. But what if you want this type of hosting but have no technical skills needed for proper server administration? In such a case, you can choose managed hosting.
What is Managed Hosting?
Managed hosting is a comprehensive term covering various types of plans, but those plans have one thing in common – hands-on technical support provided by the company. The support might be for basic things like pre-installing software and initial configuration, and more complex things like upgrading and ongoing monitoring.
Some managed hosting plans provide you direct access to a dedicated or VPS server, and the company offers support added to that for core hosting service. With this, you get the flexibility of doing what you need to or want to, but with no need of knowing all about server administration.
Tips for Finding a Managed Hosting Provider
Per se, managed hosting is like having a hosting provider to manage a part of your website hosting. Therefore you will have to decide what you will manage and what the hosting provider will manage. Better ask the provider about who will:
- Manage .NET or LAMP stack? (This will tell you by whom your Linux or Windows environment will be managed)
- Manage upgrades and security patches?
- Manage network, hardware, DNS, database, firewall, storage and OS?
- Manage load balancers, redundancy and clusters and are they included in the package?
- Manage backups of your website?
- Manage security of website?
- Manage applications, like Drupal, WordPres, Joomla, etc?
- Transfer the websites from your current hosting provider?
Also ask yourself what you would like to manage. Only a few providers do all the tasks above, because other tasks typically website-specific and need customization of every website. So, they are prolonged tasks and are risky for hosting companies and usually are not included in their packages.
Once you find out what your provider will manage, you should assess the quality of support they offer, their availability and if they can indeed resolve issues promptly.
All the above tips are provided by the experts at LiquidWeb. Operating since 1997, the company has 15 years of experience in the web hosting industry and is the fastest growing hosting provider company.
