What are the benefits of managed servers?
There are some lines of work where the expectation in terms of performance is perfection. No one wants accountants or surgeons to make mistakes, and we are generally pretty unforgiving when they do. The same applies to server managers!
When a small business has a server go down, everyone in the office suddenly turns around and looks at the IT guy or girl expecting an immediate fix… Which usually doesn’t happen. The last thing anyone wants is server downtime to affect the running of an online store, or a company website or email systems, but in reality, most small to medium enterprises don’t have the resources available to employ their own server maintenance specialist. It is one of those jobs that is hard to staff, as in reality, when a server is running well and is up-to-date, there is little work required. On the flip-side when things go wrong, you need to know exactly how to fix it quickly and with minimal impact to the business, and that takes a lot of experience.
What are fully managed hosting services?
To put it simply, managed hosting is a service which enables you to not only rent your server hardware from your hosting service provider, but also to pay for the host take care of all maintenance and manage the hardware on your behalf. It’s kind of like long-term leasing a car and knowing that the company you leased from will check your tires and oil every day and make sure everything is running as smoothly as possible.
With unmanaged services you’re on your own and you need to take full responsibility for service and maintenance of your server, which can be time-consuming and confusing for the uninitiated. Managed hosting services mean that you can always fulfil your customers needs without worrying about IT failure.
What does the host actually do?
It’s certainly worth asking any host you work with exactly what they do, but by and large their services should include at least server monitoring, security, and backing up of data.
Server monitoring is all about identifying problems before they occur and takes a preventative view of server management rather than reactive. System administrators will constantly monitor servers and quickly be able to identify potential problems before they become catastrophic failures.
Security is somewhat self-explanatory and will generally include security audits, spam filtering, virus scanning, firewall upgrades and OS upgrades, amongst other things.
As with most things in life, you could probably teach yourself to do most of these things given enough time, but the problem with not being an expert in these matters is that you don’t know what you don’t know. This means that you might be able to clue yourself up on almost everything you need to know about managing your own server but missing that small bit of information that an expert would know could mean the difference between uptime and downtime! To check out the different options of managed hosting services click here to see what Umbee Hosting, a good but typical host, has to offer; or search online, as there are a huge number of options out there.
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