Hosting decisions for your website can be a tedious and time consuming task. Between the large number of hosting companies and wide range of packages, choosing the best option seems a little like choosing lottery numbers. It would be nice to have a few yardsticks to help measure the specs and claims.

In this article we'll try to help shed light on one of the darker and more complicated choices, Managed Servers. These hosting packages carry lots of bells and whistles. While some are incredibly useful, other are just noisy trumpets with no real value.

Why Purchase Managed Services?

Choosing a managed server will relieve you of constant and diligent work required to secure and maintain your webserver. With a managed server, the hosting company works as your ‘IT department’ to keep your website up and running day in and day out. They provide constant attention to the hardware, operating system, and services within your web server. This means the host will monitor your webserver to reactively fix problems and proactively update services. Managed servers provide you peace of mind that a professional need not worry about.

What’s Not Managed?

The application layer is never considered a managed service. The “application layer” is system administrator speak for any asset on the server that makes your site unique; images, pdfs, documents, form submissions, scripts, databases, etc. Managed services typically do not provide assistance with your custom code or the content managed by the code.

Understanding the Fine Print

Many features a hosting company promotes are just distractions to your decision. For example, a 100% Guaranteed Uptime sounds important, and it is to a hosting company. But this refers to the service center hardware and your connection to the internet. It does not apply to your website, applications, services, or any combination of those items. Your site can be inaccessible for hours and it never affects their 100% uptime so it is important to be mindful of the fine print.

To learn more about how to choose a managed server and what questions to ask click here.