Managed Hosting - What's it all about?

Do You Need It?

A new trend, appearing in the Web Hosting industry, is the concept of Managed Web Hosting. Web hosts have been offering dedicated servers for a while now, however, because dedicated servers can be difficult to operate technically, there has been a demand for web hosts to provide extra services such as: reporting and monitoring; managed load balancing; managed security; managed storage; and, managed databases.

These extra services are referred to as 'managed hosting'. Do you need it? Before you think about managed hosting you will first need to decide whether or not you need a dedicated server.

You will need a dedicated server if you have a high-traffic web site. If you only have a small web site with low traffic levels then a shared hosting arrangement should be fine. A dedicated server is more expensive to rent and more difficult to operate than a shared hosting solution but if your business depends on a steady service then you should seriously consider renting a dedicated server.

The only disadvantage with dedicated web hosting is that you will have to do a lot of the server administration yourself, and to do this you will need to possess some technical skills; hence the demand for managed hosting.

If you fall into this category of needing a dedicated server but you need your host to provide system administration services such as security, firewalls, monitoring and reporting services, and data backup then most likely you will need managed hosting.