Business Directory and Guide - iBizDir.com

Managed web hosting is a little bit like buying a car where all the scheduled maintenance is included in the cost of the car. With managed web hosting, you get a dedicated server that comes with extensive technical support and maintenance services. In contrast, unmanaged dedicated web hosting provides clients with their own servers, but the clients are responsible for maintenance duties. As you might imagine, managed hosting costs more than unmanaged hosting.

Specifically, your managed hosting provider should guarantee you at least 99.8% uptime, and should have 24 hour on-site security. You should also expect the firm to have protocols for dealing with natural disaster, fire, burglary, data security breaches, and server technical problems.

Another nice perk of managed hosting is load balancing. Offered by many managed hosting vendors, load balancing distributes your site traffic most efficiently across the servers, maximizing the speed and reliability your website visitors will experience. Also, if technicians at the managed hosting firm discover a system failure on one server, they can immediately switch to another.

Firewalls are also an important consideration when choosing a managed web hosting company. Firewalls can be both software based and hardware based. The best firewall programs use both to prevent unauthorized access to the server, as well as from the server. This means that any messages leaving or entering the server have to be approved as OK by the firewall protection or else they will be blocked.

Any managed hosting provider worth its salt provides comprehensive backup programs. Regular, frequent backups will save your business if your server should crash. In fact, in some cases, backups will allow a managed host provider to switch servers in the event of a crash, virtually eliminating any downtime for your site visitors. While you must expect frequent backups from your hosting company, you should also regularly back up the files on your own system. This “belt and suspenders” approach can prevent big problems later on.

Other miscellaneous services provided by managed hosting firms include script debugging, uploading files, monitoring the site and anticipating problems so that they’re not allowed to grow into major disasters, and updating of the operating system and necessary third party applications on a timely basis.

Managed hosting companies will also provide you with the following: email accounts, file transfer protocol (FTP) accounts, manage Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates (to ensure secure business transactions on your site), detailed site statistics, and multiple domain licenses.

In a nutshell, managed hosting tells you that you should receive more support than if you were using unmanaged hosting. With unmanaged hosting, the hosting firm only concern is with making sure the servers work properly and that the site has comprehensive security and backup procedures. If you hire a firm for managed web hosting, then your main focus can be on building your site. Keeping it online, up to date, and functioning properly is the job of the managed hosting company.

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