subject: Why Managed Hosting Is A Viable Option [print this page] Many businesses are outsourcing activities related to their business that is not in their core domain. They believe that in doing so they can concentrate on their business effectively and many a time they are also able to save on costs associated with conducting that activity themselves. One such activity is managed hosting services. This is often outsourced to service providers because companies do not have the IT resources or do not wish to hire them due to their own lack of domain knowledge. They therefore prefer that a third party host takes care of hardware, installation of software, management of servers and all other types of technical elements that are part of the activity.
There are specific advantages with this approach and that is mentioned as under.
The first one is related to the competency required to maintain sites. In these times of hectic ecommerce transactions, no company wants its sites to suffer downtime and in the absence of a sound IT resource, this can easily cost the company not only loss of business but image credibility as well. Outsourcing to a professional company will take care of this problem since they are well versed with the task and would attend to any problems swiftly.
When your site is already experiencing heavy traffic or you think that it has the potential to attract lot of visitors, you have to ensure that a dedicated server is in place. This is critical as most visitors to sites nowadays hardly spend time at the site unless the site can hold their attention. If your site takes time to load or presents difficulties to the visitor to navigate due to it being part of a shared hosting architecture, you can rest assured you will lose valuable traffic and interest in your products or services.
A dedicated server ensures that the site is always up and running. A good managed hosting service provider would make sure that this dedicated server is well maintained and administered at all times and makes use of relevant control panel interfaces to keep you posted about the status when required. In fact some of the panels allow you to directly view reports on how the site is performing, the number of hits, the keyword responses and so on which are critical inputs for further development of the sites.
You can negotiate with the service provider such that they also manage the website along with their other functions of server administration, maintenance of data and so on. This will ensure that your site too is updated with news on time and visitors to the site always get the latest information on your product offers, special discounts and anything you may wish to communicate to your potential customers. If there are ecommerce transactions already taking place, then management of the software and enhancing site performance to provide a better experience to the customers can also be handled by the service provider?
Outsourcing managed hosting services can thus be a very viable and advantageous option.
