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Find the right managed hosting provider

Direction sign representing choice of managed hosting providerFinding the right managed hosting provider can be critical to your business

Given the job of taking care of your data, they play a vital role in protecting your brand, reputation, customer loyalty – and ultimately the profitability of your business.

Although there is a plethora of managed hosting providers to choose from, not all are equal.

As there are no official standards or guidelines for managed hosting providers, each offers different packages at different prices, with differing levels of security and support.

This article explains the minimum services a managed hosting provider should offer, the questions to ask and the pitfalls to avoid.

(If you’re new to this topic, get an overview of managed hosting services.)

Your managed hosting provider’s monitoring 

If something goes wrong with your managed hosting service, will you know about it? All managed hosting providers will monitor the major programs running, and will know if your server stops functioning.

However, many fail to monitor more basic items, such as the amount of free disk space. If this gets too low, it can cause major problems. 

If your managed hosting does develop a problem, someone needs to take action. The question is, who? Some managed hosting providers will send alerts to you and expect you to fix any problems. Others will handle things immediately on your behalf.

To understand the quality of monitoring offered by your managed hosting provider, ask these questions:

  • How is the server monitored?
  • How are alerts dealt with, and by whom?

Will your managed hosting provider apply patches? 

It’s very important that your managed hosting provider installs security patches and software updates to your server. Patches often fix problems that might otherwise allow hackers to access your data.

Your managed hosting provider should keep on top of security patches and updates, installing them for you unless there’s a very good reason not to. Unfortunately, not all take this approach.

Most managed hosting providers carry out updates automatically using built in tools and normally this is sufficient to protect your server. However, this isn't helpful if the patch happens to break something – at times like this, the level of support and the speed of response could make all the difference.

Additionally, some security updates can be critical and should be dealt with immediately, rather than waiting for your managed hosting provider’s next scheduled update. So when shopping around, ask:

  • Is patching done?
  • Is it manual or automated?
  • How regularly is patching carried out for standard updates?
  • How regularly is patching carried out for critical updates?

Your managed service provider’s support helpdesk 

Support is an ambiguous term. Managed hosting services are complex, often running many different applications. Your managed hosting provider’s support must cover:

In reality, some managed hosting providers will simply tell you to restart the server in the face of an issue. Others will investigate the problem for you.

To understand what level of support you can expect from your managed hosting provider, you need to know exactly where the support ends, so ask:

  • What support is offered?
  • If something goes wrong, what are the contact routes to helpdesk? (Phone, email, etc…)
  • What is the standard response time?
  • Will they provide support for the software you plan to use? If so, to what level?

Disaster recovery from your managed hosting provider 

Probably the most important part of any managed hosting service is how they are geared to respond if things go very wrong and you are faced with hardware failure or data loss.

Most managed hosting providers will promise hardware replacement within one hour. But what they don’t usually mention is that replacing hardware is the quickest and simplest task when recovering from a failure. Recovering your data is a much more time consuming task.

To find out how your managed hosting provider would deal with disaster recovery, ask:

  • How often they will call you during a server failure. They should offer regular updates – you shouldn’t have to chase them.
  • Who takes responsibility for the backups? Some providers just give you space and expect you to create your own backups.
  • What is their hardware replacement policy? (All managed hosting providers have one.)
  • Whose responsibility is it to reinstall all the software? (Not just the operating system and major programs.)
  • Who restores the data and gets the server up and running correctly?
  • How long will it take to restore your data? (Anything less than two hours for a complete restore should ring alarm bells.)

Managed hosting provider accreditations and qualifications

As there are no standards or guidelines specific to managed hosting providers, you need to look for industry and business related accreditations.

The major ones to ask for are:

  • ISO27001 Information Security Management
  • ISO20001 IT Service Management

In addition, ISO9001 Quality Management certification demonstrates quality throughout the business.

Depending on what you are looking for from your managed hosting provider, you may also want to seek out specific software and security qualifications or certifications, such as:

Choosing your managed hosting provider

As you’ve seen, the definition of ‘managed hosting’ varies widely. With so much at stake, it’s vital to research managed hosting providers and packages thoroughly, and avoid the temptation to base a business critical decision on cost alone.

If you follow the advice in this article, you'll get a good feeling for how each managed hosting provider will deliver their service. That should empower you to make the right business decision.

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(Image: red11group on Flickr.)