Benefits
Managed hosting is a term that gets thrown around a lot by hosting providers, but few take the time to go through and fully explain what it means or how it benefits your business. Managed hosting, at its core, is outsourcing the technical aspects of taking care of your servers to a third party, usually your hosting provider. This form of technology management can present both technical and business benefits.
1. Data Integrity:
Maintaining a clear chain of backups for easy reversion in case of problems can be a thorny problem to tackle, and can be quite difficult on servers that contain large or rapidly-changing stores of information, like e-commerce sites or blogs. A managed hosting solution outsources the problem of having to manage the backup and restore process to a third party that has access to tools that might not be cost-effective for individual small and mid-size businesses. This leaves your data safer and less prone to loss.
2. Security:
Keeping up to date with the latest security concerns can be a full time job in and of itself, and is for many information security professionals. Instead of overburdening your IT manager, having to hire a security specialist, or risk being left unaware of the latest threat, managed hosting allows companies to leverage the specialized services that a large hosting provider can offer due to efficiencies of scale. This means your server will be safer, and you can sleep easier knowing someone is looking over your security.
3. Smaller Workforce Needs:
Building on the last benefit, going with a managed hosting provider means that you can tap into the provider’s large pool of specialized personnel without having to grow your own human resources budget. A managed hosting provider can keep many specialists on staff, leaving you to free up budget that would otherwise go to database administrators, sysadmins, and other technicians.
4. Focus:
As a small or mid-size business owner, the last thing you want to have to worry about is whether your servers are running well or not. Outsourcing to a managed hosting provider lets you focus on your business while leaving low-level technical and maintenance concerns to people who do nothing but worry about technical and maintenance concerns. Everyone’s time is maximized and used in the most efficient way possible, and as we all know, time is money!