Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Managed Hosting and Services : Managed Hosting

[NexDog]

I've never christianed a WHT forum so I'm stoked.

Basically, I think Managed Hosting is a vague term that certain providers use to get sales. People all to often leave server admin up to the provider and then their security sucks.

Done it with Rackspace and it was bad.

[Esr Tek]

I won't get to far in this subject, but I can tell you 'fully managed' is never the same in 2 places.

I been with a few 'managed' providers...
All the ones I've been with have required me to run out and spend extra on a 3rd party contractor as they either wouldn't cover it, decided to take 6+ hrs to respond to a ticket (can't have that) or didn't have support staff on over weekends.

I'm still am at the 1 that comes closest to being 'fully managed', but even they leave things to be desired at times.

[snickn]

I'll go out on a limb and sway, I agree...Most (many) providers offer a form of management, however, I think the term "Fully Managed" should reserved for providers who truly manage the server 100% or at least, 90%.

ServInt is a provider that comes to mind. Now, not to hijack this thread, but to go in a bit of a different direction..is there a market for more ServInt type providers? Who truly offer managed services, though, definitely have their weaknesses (cough network cough) or should this be reserved for 3rd Party Server Management companies?

What about companies wishing to offer management services to arrange discounts with reputable server management companies? Which if done right, could establish true management at affordable prices still.

[LP-Trel]

I think rackspace may be the only company that provides true managed hosting. (On a quality network that is..)

[NexDog]

Sorry, but you're wrong. When we were at Rackspace, they answered our tickets very well but they weren't proactive in any service upgrades. Kernels weren't updated, php wasn't upgraded once in a year. When we left there and I hired some in-house admins, it took them days to clean out those servers and upgrade everything. Because of all the continuous remote php exploits, our uptime sucked beyond belief. I cring at the memory of my phone going off all the time saying that apache had crashed somewhere and we didn't know enough to solve things then.

So they suck at management - big time.

[snickn]

Agreed. Rackspace isn't even Quality Managed Services really. In my eyes, a managed provider would be:

1) Proactive about all security upgrades.
2) Reactive to all customer requests.
3) 24/7 Monitoring of critical services.
4) Available to consult customer regarding anything technical as needed.
5) Not too low priced.

#5 being critical, it should cost at least $100 a month for a true management package on top of the actual server. That's at minimum.

[Esr Tek]

Originally posted by nickn
In my eyes, a managed provider would be:

1) Proactive about all security upgrades.
2) Reactive to all customer requests.
3) 24/7 Monitoring of critical services.
4) Available to consult customer regarding anything technical as needed.
5) Not too low priced.

If this were the 'standard' (if there is one) for 'managed', then it be a much happier world

[NexDog]

Nick, totally correct. We charge $120 for that service and we treat client's servers just like our own. All are configured the same (firewalls, grsec etc) and all get upgraded at the same time...

[LP-Trel]

Hrm.. I have been wrong before and will be again. Guess I was.

Just from their pricing and the reviews of their service I assumed they were Fanatical about their support.

[NexDog]

The support is good, the management is sh1te.

[wheimeng]

Well then any true managed hosting out there? ServINT?

[Esr Tek]

Originally posted by UltraUnixNET
Well then any true managed hosting out there? ServINT?

HostingMatters provides exactly what Nick listed..

[net-trend]

Originally posted by UltraUnixNET
Well then any true managed hosting out there? ServINT?

Speaking from REAL experience, ServINT provides as much management as SM and that's about it.

[NexDog]

At the end of the day, no management is as good as getting your own admins. We fully manage about 15 servers and we are really hands on in there. But we are in and out of our own servers every minute of the day so we spot the issues quickly.

[linux-tech]

"fully managed servers" is just something that the datacenter uses to hook you into buying their services and servers.

When it comes down to it, the datacenter can't provide "fully managed" servers, only a server administrator can, as has been said before.

Pro-active upgrades are certainly not good, for a number of reasons. The first would be dependencies and reliability. For example, MYsql recently released 4. Well, that's all well and good, but I've got C programs that have been encoded to use the 3.xxx api and won't work under 4 for some damn reason. I'm sure I could get it working, but it'd mean a lot of work, and, right now the project is a volunteer project, so it's not worth it.

That may have been a single example, but there are countless others that have been seen by myself in the past few months, hence I've adopted an update-on-request policy. The only thing I exempt from that is kernels, which are generally updated only when new vulns are found.

Customers of WHT traditionally won't pay for true "fully managed" services, because they want everything for themselves profit wise. TRUE fully managed services should start at $250, and involve log checking, firewall administration, server administration, software updates, and the like. The $250 is something that most won't cover, simply because of datacenters trying to snow clients into believing their services are "fully managed" at less than half that cost.