Managed Cloud Webhosting - Ways It Removes Stress From Your Business

By Sharmon Shah


Managed hosting will take a great deal of pressure off of a business, in terms of availability, security, and expense. Managed hosting provides both the cost benefits and redundancy of public clouds, with the security and availability of private clouds. Many companies offer this service on a monthly contract, to businesses which are running critical applications on a long-term basis. Businesses will be allowed to focus on business functions, rather than spending time monitoring servers.

Public utilities and public clouds utilize a common pay structure. Users are charged based on their usage, while sacrificing some availability and security for the lower price. Private clouds, however, sacrifice no availability and security, but cost a great deal of money. With managed hosting, a business will benefit from the public clouds' lower price, while having the availability and security of private clouds. The managed server most commonly require monthly payments, as opposed to payments per usage, like public clouds.

High availability is a major advantage of of a managed host. The host will be able to update the hardware without a specified maintenance window, and fall over protection will be built-in. Also, the redundancies of multiple hosts, SAN storage, and network security will minimize downtime, should one of the servers crash.

Automatic fall over and resource balancing would be guaranteed by a cloud server. If one host fails, then the cloud has multiple hosts which will still provide high availability for the end user. This works because the cloud utilizes virtualization technology, which handles automatic fall over and resource balancing at the virtualization level. Many clients worry about the security of their data, within clouds. However, clouds, contrary to the misconception, have multiple network security measures, including VLANs, IDS/IPS, and firewalls, in place. With these solutions, businesses will count on the same level of security that they would have if using private clouds, for the protection of valuable data.

If needed, clouds will hybridize with physical servers. Cloud servers have the ability to share a dedicated network with a physical server, in case database engines or applications cannot meet performance requirements in the virtual environment. When applications need to access the hardware resources located on a physical server, clouds will create a physical/virtual hybrid, within the same system.

One huge advantage of this type of hosting is lower costs. Businesses will pay slightly more than they would pay for public clouds, but significantly less than they would pay for private clouds. Most businesses do not need to run their enterprise applications on a per-usage basis. In fact, applications which do run per-usage, such as development servers, research computing, and test servers, may easily occupy a lower-cost public cloud. The high security, cost-effectiveness, and availability of managed hosting create a viable cloud server option, for many types of companies. With high availability, employees are more productive; with high security, data is more protected. This type of hosting, which increases server efficiency while shrinking administrative costs, is a strong choice during tough economic times, for businesses which want to save money.




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