In assessing the potential perks of managed hosting solutions for your business, it’s vital to consider how much time and money, as well as resources, you’re willing to dedicate to managing servers in-house.
The extent of benefit you may derive from an array of managed hosting solutions may be directly related to your type of business. If your business is a technology company, for instance, you may feel that you have the manpower to handle whatever comes your way.
Even in a highly technological environment, however, managed hosting solutions can be of great benefit if you’d prefer that your IT personnel devote their valuable time to the management of other projects.
What are Fully Managed Hosting Services?
Let’s backtrack a bit and define the concept of unmanaged hosting, which entails the rental of a server from a hosting provider. Once the server has been rented, you are 100 percent responsible for all maintenance, services and upgrades to that server.
There are some exceptions to this general arrangement, however, as some unmanaged-hosting arrangements actually include basic server maintenance. Still, the lion’s share of service, including daily operation and emergency issues, fall under the jurisdiction of the renter.
On the other hand, fully managed hosting services also include server rental, but are defined by the inclusion of full hardware management as a vital element of the arrangement.
The Benefits of Managed Hosting Solutions
There are a range of valuable technical benefits inherent to fully managed hosting solutions, and server monitoring is chief among them. An ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure is the basic philosophy of monitoring servers, which entails vigilant scanning for failures and irregularities.
As this type of monitoring takes an advanced technological skill set, non-hosted monitoring is possible, but not easy.
Within the realm of server security, managed hosting solutions covers everything from the filtering of spam to software firewall configuration, virus scans, operating system updates, and more. Vigilant scanning is also a vital element of server health on the security front.
The management of storage is also a vital element of managed hosting solutions, which often entail cloud, and private-cloud, storage options. The continuing growth of cloud services and storage options are a boon to companies with storage needs that continuously expand, especially because the cost of managing new storage demands can become inconvenient and cost prohibitive.
Last but certainly not least, managed solutions are a serious asset as applied to data backup. The loss of data can be devastating to productivity and client relationships, so establishing processes that ensure integrity are a must-have, regardless of the nature of the chosen solution.
Perhaps the most important thing to remember about managed solutions is that they are customizable, not simple one-size-fits-all solutions that don’t address specific needs. With this in mind, designing a solution that works for you is simply a matter of telling the experts what you want to get the answers that you need.
