Hi Guys,

I'm interested in the managed hosting market - as in, the Rackspace style proactive support, monitoring etc for dedicated server clients.

Currently all the kit that I work with is colocated at a datacenter near where we are based, but we are not on site. I know that for managed hosting to work we would need to be on site, obiviously. Bu what is there that we would have to look at if we really wanted to do this? what do we need to take into account staffing wise and replacement parts etc? Also do you think solutions should be "off the shelf" or totally designed for every customer?

Thanks for the input!

Hmm. Considering you're using dedicated servers, I would first suggest collocating at a data center that offers management to make your life easier. Since you're not located where your servers are, I don't see the problem in finding the best DC for your company that can handle your servers 24 hours, 7 days a week. I don't see the price in collocation going up that much higher with management.

If you want to be ready for any disasters, I'd suggest keeping an eye on the bandwidth use and the sort of traffic the servers are getting. Make sure your clients aren't using more resources than the server has been allocated.

You'll want to set up a security feature as well so your servers aren't vulnerable. This will sometimes lead to extensive downtime so be careful.

I don't exactly understand what you mean by having your solutions off the shelf or designed for every customer cause it really depends on the problem your client is having. If it's in the case of requiring more resources, you will obviously need to order some more. You should state on your TOS how long upgrades take so your clients aren't deceived in terms of when they will receive their 'solution'.

Hi,

Currently we are using dedicated servers rented for shared / reseller offerings, this is slowly being moved over to owned dell hardware which is being colocated.

For this new area I am questioning if we should have our own guys on site at the datacenter where the servers would be located.

By 'off the shelf' solutions I mean having set servers that we can roll out in a few hours, or should we go more along the line of meeting the customer to discuss their needs and building a solution around that, so purchasing the machine(s) needed to run the agreed solution, that gives a more personal service to the customer but also increases lead times on service delivery and would require a lot more work and man power, although at this planning stage that is no issue.

Come on guys some more input would be ace :)

If your going to do the personal approach, your really going to have to do a lot of marketing for customers to want to contact you without them knowing the price ahead of time. I dont know about you, but unless i am really familiar with the company, i always go back to google to search for another site when a site says "call for price or quote".