For a small business owner, one thing that worries him the most includes inefficiency as well as extra costs. Today, most of the small businesses operate beyond their conventional and scheduled hours and the owner of such businesses push themselves beyond their limit to make it a success. As there is a very little fraction of time and money that remains with the owners, the issues pertaining to server and hosting can arise and these can either make or break the business. Most of the small-sized businesses have often landed into such serious issues like losing out important data. To mitigate such issues, managed web hosting can be of great help to small businesses.
Let’s Define Managed Hosting…
Managed hosting depicts an IT provisioning model in which a service provider leases out certain servers and other associated hardware to a client. A managed service can be seen as an on-demand service where the user the amount of only for certain resources that he’s going to use. All the hardware is located and managed at the hosting provider’s premises and managed by the in-house support team.
It differs from other types of hosting services as in this case, the hosting provider is responsible for administrating the software, operating systems, and other system software. In managed hosting, the provider is responsible for managing responsibilities like- hardware configuration, installation & configuration of software, offering technical support, maintenance of the systems and patch management.
Depending on the selected hosting package, the user gets add-ons and other services like- backups, load balancing, disaster recovery, DDoS prevention and migration.
How Unmanaged Hosting is Different?
On the contrary, in the case of unmanaged hosting, the user rents his server from the hosting provider and the user is solely responsible for all tasks related to service and maintenance.
Benefits of Managed Hosting
Following are the benefits that managed hosting provides to small businesses-
- Customized Needs: Every company irrespective of its size has got its set of different needs and a reputed managed hosting provider extends itself beyond the conventional approach of ‘one-size-fits-all’ for meeting the requirements that every individual might be having. With a trusted managed hosting provider, the user gets solution that is purely based as per his needs. This can be extremely beneficial as the user can negotiate with the provider to facilitate those services only that best fits his requirements and the ones that are of higher criticality to him based on the business needs and budget.
- Server Monitoring Server monitoring is a critical business operation for any organization. It involves the process of regularly scanning the servers to look for any fallacies. System admins need to monitor the servers regularly to identify these points of failures and address them before they become a serious concern. When the small business owners opt for a managed hosting provider, there is consistent and detailed attention given by the system admins for providing constant updates of the servers. This, in turn, gives a good uptime and network availability that the business owners provide to themselves as well as their clients.
- Security Server security is one of the top priorities for any business. Server security includes the following aspects that are related to security umbrella-
- Running security audits
- Filtering spams
- Scanning for viruses
- Configuration of the software firewall
- OS updates
Managed hosting providers are well-versed with tools and hold a great amount of experience when it comes to dealing with issues related to server security. They regularly perform scanning of the operating systems and core applications to detect any kind of security vulnerabilities, that can be fixed prior to being attacked.
- Managed Database Managed hosting providers provide you a team of skilled and expertise DBAs in place of the system admins. The DBAs can be software as well as service consultants for designing the best database systems to meet the needs and requirements of the business. With a managed hosting provider, the small business owners can gain the maximum benefits of an expertise DBA team that is needed to meet their requirements related to databases.
- Data Backups Having regular and up-to-date backups of the business data is very important as losing out valuable data can have a negative impact on the business. Thus, it is crucial to keep the data secured and backed up at regular intervals. With a managed hosting service provider, the small businesses are ensured that their data has been backed up and can be retrieved and used later if required.
These above-stated benefits can be of great aid when it comes to small businesses. The owners of these businesses look to save on money and time by avoiding any unnecessary overhead costs and with a managed hosting provider, the small businesses can encash on these, as the businesses don’t have to carry the burden like-managing IT architecture, allotting their in-house IT team to look after their server and systems, etc.
If you’re looking for a trustworthy and reputed managed hosting provider to cater to your business needs, then don’t hesitate to reach out to bodHOST and gain in leverage their experience in the hosting industry to your business.