Three Reasons Why You Should Consider Managed Hosting

Wednesday, 09 December 2009

If you've created a website for business or  for pleasure, sooner or later you'll run into the question of how to host it.   There are many hosting options available, but managed hosting is one that you should seriously consider.  Managed hosting is where you lease your own dedicated server (as opposed to sharing it with other website owners), but you don't have full control over it.  You can upload files and manage your data, but the actual running of the server is managed for you by the hosting company.

Three main reasons considering managed hosting

1. Quality Of Service
Managed hosting gives you all the benefits of dedicated server space, such as speed and larger amounts of bandwidth, but none of the headaches.  It's a bit like renting a luxury apartment.  You get to enjoy living in it, and it's somebody else's responsibility to fix any problems.  Also, many website owners find it reassuring to know that. even if they go crazy with their data management, they can't affect the core operation of the server!

2. Price
Managed hosting can be very competitive in terms of price, due to economies of scale.  Although each individual site gets a very generous amount of bandwidth, it's relatively small when it's shared out amongst lots of sites.  Likewise, costs for things like server maintenance and networking software can be spread out between lots of clients.  

3. Features
The same economies of scale mean that you can get advanced features for a fraction of the cost of a dedicated host.  These include advanced security and data backup services, and guaranteed uptime approaching 100% - something that an individual host would find very hard to achieve without spending a lot of money.

Above all, managed hosting is flexible - you can upgrade for even more bandwidth and traffic capacity any time you choose.  Managed hosting then, is a great way to get the same quality of service as a dedicated server, for a lot less money and hassle.  If you haven't already considered it, you could be missing out.