Managed Web Hosting Service Providers

A managed web hosting service provider, takes over all aspects of technical infrastructure control, leaving the webmaster to concentrate on running their own website. Dedicated hosting is much more robust than shared business hosting. The customer does not see or touch their private leased server, but will remote access via a control panel. This panel enables the customer to oversee the administration and statistical performance. A managed web hosting company employs equipment specialists and software engineers, to monitor and maintain the server farm around the clock. Their job is to guarantee a reliable, secure and highly efficient hosting environment.

Renting a reliable dedicated server is most appropriate for websites that require continuous uptime, large amounts of disk space, and high bandwidth ,(to cope with high numbers of unique visitors). Whereas shared hosting plans are better suited to smaller websites, that can afford to suffer the odd unplanned downtime. Whereas, mission-critical services delivered online, usually require a highly durable dedicated server environment. Ironically, most businesses that hire a dedicated server, rarely have the in-house technical skills to optimise the performance of the machine. In addition, most high-end servers require a cooled and reliable data centre (which many smaller businesses do not have). Instead, many businesses prefer to entrust the responsibility to support technicians, based in the professionally run data centre environment of a managed web hosting company.

A typical managed web hosting service plan, provides a range of services at a monthly rental fee (typically thousands of pounds per month). Look closely at the Terms and Conditions of ‘full managed’ plans promoted. Many plans’ vary by the quantity and type of hosting services provided. Some will put the onus on the client to manage their own data and install their own software applications. For very inexperienced webmasters, this can technically challenging (as well as quite intimidating). With this in mind, the main types of computer services that are on offer are as follows:-

• 24 Hour x 365 days a year (engineering support and customer service via telephone or online).
• Server provisioning, load balancing, configuring, optimisation and administration.
• Server monitoring and hardware fault fixing.
• Backup and restore services.
• Server rebooting.
• Software upgrades and operating system tweaks.
• Firewall security maintenance.
• Bandwidth provisioning and Internet network connectivity.
• Datacentre maintenance including heating, air conditioning and redundant power systems management.

Once up and running on your own dedicated server, it can be difficult to switch hosting companies (should you requirements change or you fall out with the provider in the future). You need to check on a few things, before you sign the service agreement:-

• Engineering Capabilities - one of biggest drawbacks when dealing with a really large managed web hosting company, is that your dedicated hardware engineer may be tasked to support dozens of other customers’ servers in the same data centre, as well as yours. This can sometimes be frustrating, if you have raised an urgent support ticket to fix a hardware fault on your server; only to find that they are busy dealing with other escalated support tickets, on other machines.

• Datacenter Sharing - another drawback sometimes relates to situations when you later discover, your managed web hosting company is actually ‘leasing’ floor space and servers from the real owner of the datacenter. Many do not actively promote this fact on their own website (for obvious reasons). It is not necessarily sharp practice, as suppliers in the IT industry often outsource services to specialists. However, when the data centre owners initiates planned downtime or software upgrades, this can sometimes go against the business requirements of the managed web hosting company or you as the end user client.

• Inflexibility – for less technical webmasters, the rigorous methodologies employed by hosting companies, means installing new applications can be devilishly difficult. Many providers will not take responsibility for customer data or web applications. Even placing a fault call can become troublesome, if the fault relates to an application not supported by the hosting company. You will be expected to support that application yourself, or get your software company permission to remotely access your dedicated server to do the job for you.

Most managed web hosting companies’ will offer a certain level of up time; e.g. 99.9% guaranteed up time. In other words, any unplanned downtime above 0.1% would result in financial penalties. It is their key selling point. The 'Service Level Agreement' would define any money back guarantees, (normally be in proportion to downtime length). The premium charged for high levels of guaranteed up time, give webmasters the confidence to focus on promoting their website. You will have the comfort of knowing penalties exist to ensure the hosting company keeps your website online at all times. Beware that the average penalty reimbursement, is usually far less than the loss of business revenues and customer goodwill for the period of unplanned downtime. It merely aims to re-enforce the sales message, that managed web hosting providers all offer - guaranteed reliability of up time.