Managed Hosting also popularly known as Dedicated Managed Hosting is totally different compared to a Dedicated Server to a degree. The reason can be drawn from the point that the Dedicated Server is not integrated with any professional support and when it does it is mainly for replacement of a hardware that has failed. Managed Hosting on the other hand comes with a support that is already included. All the day in and out requirements of maintaining and running the server for you are dealt by a support professional. Issues such as software updates, patch management, hardware upgrades and firewalls are dealt with by a professional site administrator in the Network Operations Center or NOC. The price for this is just a fraction only compared to having your own site administrator. One of the benefits of this is that you will not have to undertake the headache of dealing with the troubleshooting of the technical problems.
According to the Netcraft report, recently RHL or Red Hat Linux is the most commonly used operating system for most of the services of Managed Hosting.
Few of the things that are involved in the process of managed hosting are dedicated servers, my space portal, customers and collocation services. This is the type of web hosting where clients prefer to lease a particular sever that is not being shared with no one as there is more flexibility in this than the one that is being shared with another.
Some of the services that can be availed in the process includes application updates, updates for operating system software, hardware monitoring for SNMP, server monitoring, application monitoring, technical support, application management, antivirus update, firewall services, security audits, restorations and backups, database administration, disaster recovery and programming consultations and user management. These services are offered in different packages for the clients to select from.
To select the best Managed Hosting service provider from the managed hosting market platform to cherish the advantages of managed hosting services, you need to keep few things in mind to look for:
• A service provider in Managed Hosting who is experienced will have an in-house team for creation for making contents for placing and innovative designs for websites. This in-house team should be able to advice on the volume of multimedia elements combination such as videos, images, animations and text to keep the audience focused and interested on the website.
• As we know the hosting needs to be performed on the servers. So a good Managed Hosting provider should have sufficient server capacity so as to serve to multiple clients.
• The speed of the server is very much vital as overall performance depends on the server speed to a great extent. You should check on the server features to verify that the speed of the server is sufficient to serve to the requests of different clients at the same time.
• Another factor of great importance is the service provider’s network capacity. While choosing a web hosting provider, you have to keep in mind that this bandwidth will be distributed among many of their clients. Therefore you need to ask them what they would do when they face heavy traffic conditions. Web congestion is to be avoided at all cost as this greatly decreases the satisfaction level of your consumers.
• Gather more knowledge on the steps that the managed hosting service provider takes to increase the flow of traffic towards your portal. They should be familiar with the latest strategies of SEO which consistently yield results and are very effective.
• A strong web hosting plan for data backup should be there in its place. This plan may include storing the information in locations which are very secure and periodically archiving the data. Also check for availability of more than one server to make sure that one server operates well if another one is not functioning for seamless service.
• Enquire about the ancillary software to be installed for your allocated servers. This may include firewalls, anti-spam software, antivirus and other software for security purpose. There is also some software that can boost the speed of the managed hosting server.
• Lastly these high-quality services should be provided by the service provider at economic costs. Lots of cheap website hosting is available, so pick according to your need.