What is managed hosting?

Every business with a website or application needs infrastructure, from eCommerce sites selling one product to development agencies building hundreds of web applications. Businesses and individual developers alike build websites and applications that run on servers, and increasingly these servers are from public cloud providers. However, many small businesses lack the in-house expertise to manage their cloud services, or simply don’t want to spend their limited time and resources on configuring their cloud servers rather than on their core business needs.

While public cloud providers remove the need for businesses to maintain their own on-premises infrastructure, all cloud services still require knowledge to configure and maintain infrastructure. Even a provider like DigitalOcean, which puts simplicity at its core and provides a wealth of tutorials and documentation to users, requires technical knowledge and training to utilize. Larger cloud providers take even longer to learn, as their interfaces can be incredibly complex. Luckily, there are many services that enable small businesses to get the benefits of a cloud service such as DigitalOcean without managing the backend themselves.

Managed hosting providers have grown in prevalence over the past years as public cloud services have become the default for new businesses and startups. Managed hosting providers allow developers and businesses to offload their infrastructure management, configuration, and support to a company like Cloudways, a DigitalOcean company which is an expert in providing managed hosting solutions for websites on top of cloud. This allows the businesses themselves to focus on creating an engaging website or building a better software application without worrying about critical services going offline due to a poor hosting setup.

Benefits of Managed Hosting

There are several benefits of utilizing a managed hosting provider, including:

• Cost and time savings: Small teams often don’t have the time or existing talent to manage their cloud services internally, and hiring someone to work on cloud services can be expensive. Businesses and developers can save both time and money by offloading cloud work to an external managed hosting provider.
• Improved performance and reliability: Managed hosting services specialize in understanding the optimal configuration of cloud services for speed and reliability, including which servers, content delivery networks (CDNs), and caching solutions will best serve your application.
• Enhanced security and backups: While public cloud providers come with built-in security features, managed hosting services can set up enhanced security measures such as firewalls, manage your SSL certificates, and conduct security patching. Hosting providers can also perform regular backups for you so your work is never lost.
• Dedicated support: Managed hosting providers give you dedicated, around-the-clock support so if outages or other issues arise, they are quickly dealt with by a full-service support team.
• Pricing transparency: Public clouds can often have complex pricing models, and managed providers give businesses more insight and control over their costs by providing subscription plans with flat and transparent pricing.

Choosing a managed hosting provider

There are clear benefits to using a managed hosting provider, especially for small businesses who want to focus on their core work, but choosing the right provider can be overwhelming. There are hundreds of managed hosting providers, and some specialize in hosting for specific applications, such as WordPress, while others provide more generalized solutions.

Some of the factors you should consider when choosing a managed hosting provider include cost and pricing transparency, the type of website or application you are building, support tiers, and the public clouds that the hosting provider utilizes. Many managed hosting providers offer services built on top of multiple public clouds, but pricing and features may differ depending on the cloud provider you choose.

Get all the benefits of DigitalOcean through a managed hosting provider

DigitalOcean provides small businesses and developers with the simplicity, flexibility, and reliability that they need to build and grow their websites and applications, and our transparent pricing ensures that bills are predictable and affordable. However, we recognize that many businesses don’t have the capacity to set up and maintain their cloud services, which is why we’re pleased to partner with several leading managed hosting providers who offer our services in a managed environment. You can get started quickly on Cloudways by DigitalOcean today.