Managed Hosting: Your Guide to Outsourcing the Support Your Website Needs

If you’re in the process of building a new website to meet your organization’s multifaceted needs, it’s wise to revisit your hosting options. After all, before your website can support your marketing objectives, it first must offer two foundational elements: security and functionality. 

Hosting your website internally can be problematic. Unless you have a dedicated data center, robust servers, and employees with in-depth knowledge and experience in this area, you’re assuming a lot of risks. 

On the other hand, you may already be using an external hosting option. But building a new enterprise website is the perfect time to look around and make sure you’re getting the right level of service at the best price. 

Whether you’re exploring managed hosting for the first time or reevaluating your options, here’s what you need to know.

Managed Hosting Vs. Other Hosting Options

Managed hosting includes holistic system administration, support services, and security for your website. Providers typically offer a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which guarantees certain performance metrics for website uptime, ticket response time, service restoration time, and compliance. The cost will depend on the level of service you require.

Other hosting solutions can work too, but they don’t offer the same level of comprehensive service. Here’s a quick look at your other options. 

Self Hosting

Many organizations handle their own hosting needs — either on their own internal servers, in the cloud, or via shared hosting providers. This could be your most cost-effective option, especially if you have competent team members to stay on top of your system requirements. 

But even if you feel your organization is well-positioned to manage your hosting needs internally, there are legitimate reasons to outsource. The web continues to become more and more complex. Security risks and compliance concerns are always increasing. And websites continue to grow in size and capability requirements. 

As a result, your website could go down any time you experience higher levels of traffic than normal. If you don’t have the means or the knowledge to put adequate safeguards in place, you could experience a costly data breach. And even if you avoid any worst-case cybersecurity scenarios, a simple failure to renew security certificates means browsers can block visitors from accessing your site.

The apparent lower price tag of self-hosting can come at a hefty cost. 

Cloud Hosting 

Essentially, any hosting provider that provides shared or virtual (software-based) servers using their own or leased data center servers is providing cloud hosting. 

For example, Amazon AWS, Google GCP, and Microsoft Azure are popular choices for many organizations that have the staff to implement and manage the virtual servers.

Other hosting providers may resell these servers or have their own data center resources, and bundle pre-configured operating systems and software that do not require the same level of technical staff.

Generally, cloud hosting includes a web-based interface for customers to access and manage their hosting. This carries many of the same risks as self-hosting.

Vendor/Agency Hosting 

Some web agencies and web service providers include hosting as part of their package. For example, SaaS website builders such as Squarespace and Wix include hosting services. But like other cloud hosting options, most of the responsibility for troubleshooting issues and proactively keeping certificates up to date may fall on you.

Bare Metal/Co-location

This type of hosting is essentially the opposite of cloud hosting. In this scenario, you either lease physical servers from a host, or the space to store your own servers with support such as power, UPC, and data connections. Everything else related to managing your website continues to fall on your shoulders. 

The Benefits of Managed Hosting — and What to Expect in Terms of Cost 

The primary advantage of investing in a managed hosting solution is that it moves the responsibility for keeping your website up, running, and secure off of your organization’s plate and into the hands of an expert.

In terms of cost, you could potentially pay as little as $50 a month for managed hosting services. Conversely, you could easily spend $2,000 or more a month. It all depends on the level of service you require and the amount of risk you are willing and able to assume.

Service level agreements vary, but in general, your host will:

• Regularly back up your data and content
• Keep operating system and software up to date and patched
• Proactively scan your system for performance issues
• Monitor your website traffic, and add resources to your site as needed to prevent your site from going down 
• Fix errors and respond to other service requests
• Meet your company’s specific compliance requirements

There are two ways to make sure your relationship with a managed host provider is as beneficial as possible.

1. Make Sure Your SLA Aligns With Your Organizational Needs

The most challenging part of choosing a managed hosting provider is making sure you are truly getting what you need out of the contract. Weigh these considerations as you vet possible partners:

• Guaranteed uptime. If your website is mission-critical to your organization, you will likely need high levels of guaranteed uptime. Think through whether you can afford a five-minute downtime or if even 30 seconds of interrupted service could be problematic. You’ll pay a moderate amount for uptime of up to 98-99% and then a premium for every sub percentage after that. 
• Response time. Another important metric to pay attention to is how long it will take for your host to respond to issues when they arise. Again, the more rapid the guaranteed response time, the more you’ll pay. 
• Proactive monitoring. Your host should not wait for you to flag issues for them to solve. Your SLA should spell out exactly what steps they will take to monitor your site and identify potential problems before they arise. 
• Compliance and security requirements. If your organization has specific compliance and security needs, explore this area of the SLA thoroughly to ensure the host can meet your expectations. For example, some regulatory bodies don’t permit user data to be stored and accessed outside of a particular country or geographic area. Make sure your host can comply with your specific set of requirements.
• Technology stack. Some hosts specialize in hosting particular technology stacks. For example, Drupal-built sites often use Linux, Apache, and MySQL. If your site uses these technologies, we can recommend various options to fit your needs.

In general, the more complex your needs, the more expensive managed hosting becomes. It’s not uncommon to pay as much as $40,000 per year if you require nearly uninterrupted uptime and top-notch security.

2. Evaluate Whether Your Web Developer Will Be Able to Work Effectively With Your Managed Host Provider

Your audience’s needs are always changing and evolving. And to reach your users effectively, you need to keep your website relevant and fresh. Therefore, it’s smart to hire a web developer who views building your site as the beginning of a long-term relationship. A good vendor will offer ongoing support to ensure your website continues to reach its full potential. 

That’s why it’s helpful to choose a managed host who will collaborate with your web developer. This ensures you receive superior service for every part of your site. 

For instance, say your managed host needs to update a certain element within your technology stack. That one change might have ramifications on the design or build your developer has created. If the two entities work together, your developer can plan a response to the host’s update that takes all impacted areas into account.

We experienced this recently when a large managed hosting provider made a PHP update that affected a number of our clients. Because we knew exactly what changes they were making, we could identify any piece of code that was impacted and take action before the update had occurred. 

Need Help Evaluating Your Managed Hosting Options? 

If your organization counts on your website to function as the hub of your marketing efforts, and you don’t have an agile team internally that manages your hosting needs, managed hosting is a must. It’s that simple.

But managed hosting is a complex topic, and it’s understandable if you need more help selecting the right provider and the appropriate level of support for your needs. If that’s the case, get in touch. We’d be happy to help.