Having a good place to stash all your data and keep your servers up and running has transformed to being vital to any company’s existence. Hosting companies are defined by their ability to offer you varying degrees of customer service, technical competency, and ability to keep your site from ever going down.
This is where the difference between unmanaged hosting and managed hosting comes into play. Discovering how these two different services affect the end user and how to decide what works best for different companies is an important topic business owners should be aware of.
The difference in hosting plans
The most basic plans offer a server with an operating system installed that only offer the hardware itself. With unmanaged hosting, this hardware is offered generally with no guarantees and no pre-installed software like Apache of PHP systems. In addition, unmanaged hosting offers no additional services that are highly important to hosting like status monitoring, security scanning, malware removal, and a number of other automated functions.
Managed hosting includes these management features, while offering prompt customer service if any server related issues arise. However, some companies offer different services in the managed hosting packages, but there are some that are offered standard between them all.
- Security and malware monitoring
The first line of defense for your server is put in place here. Security and malware removal are two of the most important issues for servers today that a huge amount of people are affected by. With all the reports of cloud hacking going on in the media today, it really shouldn’t be a question that this service is required if you want to be safe with your hosting.
There are quite a few standard safety mechanisms that are being used by hosting providers like cPanel and Plesk. Providers offering these services do have to charge for their use as they require a subscription fee to employ.
- Performance monitoring
Instead of loading up your site at 5pm only to find it has been overloaded with traffic and went down last night at 2am, you can get a message the moment your site is experiencing too much traffic. This allows a site technician to hope on and fix the issue nearly immediately.
- Automatic updates for software
Having updates come automatically to your mainframe software is a huge load off of developer’s backs as it can be transported to you directly after they become publicly available. Not ever managed service includes this offer but most will.
Always remember that if you have a piece of legacy software it has a chance of not working with fully up-to-date developing software, so this should always be looked into before signing off on this service.
- Fully automatic backup
Instead of having to constantly be worrying about your beautiful data going out the window with some kind of data corruption, full back up is an option offered by managed hosting providers. When you hear that a provider offers automatic backup, always inquire about the following:
- Is my site used as the location for the backup storage?
- Are all of my databases included in the backup?
The first question is vital because using a site that is not the same is the only way to truly provide data backup. In the event of a hardware failure, this will cause all data to be lost.
Backing up your databases is the most important part of doing any backup. Losing this will cause all SEO value to be completely lost as the content will be forever gone along with comments and user base. No matter the medium, make sure the backup process is throughout and extremely secure.
With the huge selection of backup providers, managed hosting providers do not necessarily all measure up to the same standard when it comes to who backs up your data the best. This is the main point of differentiation between hosting providers. Discover what software they use to do backups and research the nature of this software and how it stands up against the competition.
- Offering services on-demand
This kind of managed hosting deals with a customer support structure that offers all of the above in a mixture based on the ability to do one-time payments. For example, this means that you can have the malware detection running automatically but not have any removal unless you’d like to pay for that one time service cost.
These different packages are shaped to fill different website’s needs. Taking on additional managed services to be fully automatic or taking an on-demand approach is up to what the company thinks is best for them at the time.
To find out more about how hosting works and how different companies operate, it’s always best to do in-depth research on the company well before considering signing with them.
You can discover what ISHIR has to offer in terms of managed hosting right here if you’d like to do some of this research.
Image credits: https://pixabay.com/en/code-programming-hacking-html-web-820275/
By: Meenakshi Vashisht