Managed hosting differs from dedicated hosting in that as well as providing the same professional infrastructure as dedicated hosting, the addition of administration and management of the infrastructure as an integrated service provides a more hand-off experience for the customer.
With managed hosting, organisations are able to completely outsource the daily management of the underlying infrastructure to the hosting provider and shift their focus to developing other more strategic IT objectives.
Typically, managed hosting is being used by organisations whose success is dependant on its web strategy. Increasingly, the following are being managed by professional hosting providers, allowing IT departments to become more strategic rather than tactical.
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Websites (Ecommerce, intranets, extranets) - particularly where high availability is a prerequisite
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Applications (e.g. SaaS offerings, Hosted Exchange, Web 2.0 applications, Multimedia applications or CRM/ ERP)
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Business Continuity - Disaster Recovery (DR), Auto Fail-over Hot Site Recovery
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Database servers (handling database machines such as Sybase, Ingres, Oracle, Informix)
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Examples of Hosted File servers
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Dedicated Servers
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Storage Area Networks (San Servers)
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Virtualisation (VMware)
The hosting provider is principally responsible for providing dedicated servers, support and ongoing maintenance.
The level of support is generally dictated by client requirements but includes several levels of monitoring, troubleshooting, backup, software / security patching, and other standard management tasks.
To request quotes/proposals from qualified managed hosting providers, please complete the form on the right.