When choosing your managed server, it is important to know the right questions to ask for the best ROI. Each managed server is handled differently. Knowing the answer to these questions can help you make an educated decision:

What types of monitoring do you provide? 

The more monitoring you can get the better. Typical answers include HTTP response analysis, CPU usage thresholds, response times, etc. No matter what the answer, we also recommedn you set up a third party monitor to verify response from your webserver.

How frequesntly will they run the monitor?

As a minimum, HTTP response monitors should run every 15 minutes. If they are monitoring server activity (CPU Threshold), then we would suggest every 5 minutes. 

In the event of a monitored failure, who is alerted?

You may be surprised to learn that some managed services will alert you in the event of a problem. Make sure that the hosting company is the first line of depense. 

How fast is the response to the alert of a failed monitor?

This time will vary among hosts and may even be a vague time frame like "quickly" or "in a timely fashion." Just know that fixed response times will usually come with Service Level Agreements (SLA) and will increase costs substantially. The purpose of this question is to illicit a response.

What assistance do you provide for the Application Layer?

"But you said this wasn't covered?" Yes, I did. However, hosting companies are trying to add value to their packages. Some are beginning to offer vague benefits such as "code review," or "application assistance." These are not standard services and your mileage will vary. These services may add real value to your migration or even assist with maintaining your site. 

How do you protect my server from intrusion?

While this is an important questions to ask, it's an answer better understood by your system administrator. Simply put, you want to make sure that the managed hosting includes some effort to stop intrusion. For further explanation, consult Cool Blue. 

Do you offer offsite backups?

Offsite backups are typically within the same datacenter, but can also go to a third party host such as Amazon Cloud Files. Often this feature is included within manages packages, but never setup. If you purchase a plan with an offsite backup, be sure to follow up after the sale. 

For more information about servers and hosting options check out the Managed Servers article or contact Cool Blue.