If you've not heard of it before, managed or dedicated hosting means an organisation rents a whole server rather than one shared with another business. Many companies love it because it means they have greater control, for example over things like choice of hardware or operating system, along with reduced overheads.
With dedicated hosting, the service provider owns the server hardware, and can also often provide server administration as an extra service.
Managed hosting can ensure high levels of website availability, and minimise downtime while also offering high-speed accessibility. It also helps you make best use of your resources by offering constant monitoring of your server, with continuous technical support so you get troubleshooting whenever you need it. And you won't even need to recruit or train staff to manage your dedicated servers.
Other benefits of dedicated hosting include guaranteed server security for complete peace of mind, extra features to make your website look more professional, and back-up facilities coupled with disaster recovery.
Equally importantly, by taking away the pressure of server management, this kind of website hosting means you can concentrate on your core business, and its growth, while someone else takes care of managing your servers. It really can help you maintain a professional image, giving you a crucial edge over the competition.
And if you thought managed hosting had to be prohibitively expensive, think again. In fact, there are several different kinds of dedicated hosting, including fully or partially managed hosting, and colocation hosting. You need to decide which one best suits your company's needs and budget.
While fully managed website hosting involves the outsourcing of security, maintenance, monitoring and even performance optimisation to outside professionals, with the partially managed variety, you can select which of the services you need.
With colocation hosting, you keep your services on the service provider's premises, and let them take care of maintenance and physical security. The idea, essentially, is that you place IT infrastructure and data in someone else's facility, rather like putting your money in a bank rather than keeping it at home.
Many organisations find that colocation web hosting provides potential for high-speed connections and abundant bandwidth, however you are only charged for what you actually used. This can make colocation hosting an extremely cost-effective option.
You will also find you have strong protection against outages, with general guarantees of uptime of more than 99%. There also tends to be extremely high levels of security. And, if your business moves, your IT equipment doesn't have to.
With colocation web hosting, you will own both the software and the hardware. So whatever software you want, you can just buy it and install it on your own machines.
At ControlCircle, we offer extensive expertise in both kinds of web hosting with reliable, 24-hour datacentre hosting, state-of-the-art security, uptime guarantees of 99.99% and much more.
