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

[dbihosting]

When you being the search for managed hosting. What are your top 3 features you look for?

[FasterUpload]

I want to make sure that the server will be secure in the end.

Price is important; making sure it's not double the prices of others.

And uptime. They should be able to fix any downtime errors quickly at 2 AM in the morning.

[dbihosting]

Reasonable requests. Thank you for the input.

[Toby H]

Truely for managed hosting, If im talking about for business use I would expect the following....

* monthly patching of OS and any supported software
* 24*7 server and service monitoring
* 4 hour hardware failure replacement

Thats my top 3, others would include 24/7 telephone support and high uptime. Although I would expect to pay a premium for this, much like rackspace

[pmabraham]

Greetings:

What is the guaranteed response time?

What portions of the service are proactive, and how those parts of the service are proactive?

How long has the company been in business?

There was a post about price. Since there are no established patterns, and there are some companies that undercharge in relation to their costs (something is not right – either experience, skils, etc.), listing price as a top three factor is not safe in my opinion.

Thank you.

[98dmalcolm]

I would always make sure that whatever you expect you get down in detail on a contract. Main points such as uptime and 24x7 support are fairly well marketed by every and all companies but discovering the intangibles is also pretty important.

1. Are they any good i.e. Uptime/References...

2. Do they really understand what you need/want or are they just going to upsell you at every opportunity.

3. How flexible do you need them to be to fit into your existing business model

[Toby H]

Originally Posted by dynamicnet

What is the guaranteed response time?

What portions of the service are proactive, and how those parts of the service are proactive?

How long has the company been in business?

First 2 there I agree with, thats really important, but the How long have they been in business could be a little unfair, since it potentially writes off all new startups which will stop them ever getting a foothold in the industry. Just becuase the company is new doesn't mean their equipment and staff aren't up to it!

[utropicmedia-karl]

Originally Posted by Toby H

Truely for managed hosting, If im talking about for business use I would expect the following....

* monthly patching of OS and any supported software
* 24*7 server and service monitoring
* 4 hour hardware failure replacement

Thats my top 3, others would include 24/7 telephone support and high uptime. Although I would expect to pay a premium for this, much like rackspace

See, I agree with your definition, but we operate under a different one. Just for comparison, yesterday one of our fully-managed clients asked for us to restore a database from backup, but he only needed info from a few rows, so we restored it to a temp database which allowed him to get what he needed and update the live db.

To us, that is fully managed. Perhaps the things you mentioned are "managed" ? It's a shame there is so much confusion over this topic.



Regards,

[Toby H]

Originally Posted by utropicmedia-karl

See, I agree with your definition, but we operate under a different one. Just for comparison, yesterday one of our fully-managed clients asked for us to restore a database from backup, but he only needed info from a few rows, so we restored it to a temp database which allowed him to get what he needed and update the live db.

To us, that is fully managed. Perhaps the things you mentioned are "managed" ? It's a shame there is so much confusion over this topic.



Regards,

I agree, Managed hosting is a topic which is somewhat a gray area, I would agree with what you said also with regard to the database backup, but I would also say there are 'levels' of service in managed hosting going from basic OS updates and hardware support to full application support and development.

[cartika-andrew]

Originally Posted by xtrafile1

Price is important; making sure it's not double the prices of others.

depends on what sort of management we are talking about right?

Double the cost? heck, the definition of fully managed dramatically changes from 1 provider to the next. I can see the price easily being double or triple for a real fully managed solution compared to scaled down "fully managed" definition.

How much does proactive monitoring cost?
How much does 24x7x365 proactive response cost? (ie techs are on the server before you contact them with a problem)
How about managed firewalls?
How about managed backups?
etc, etc, etc...

Price of managed hosting varies dramatically because the services being offered vary dramatically.

Originally Posted by utropicmedia-karl

See, I agree with your definition, but we operate under a different one. Just for comparison, yesterday one of our fully-managed clients asked for us to restore a database from backup, but he only needed info from a few rows, so we restored it to a temp database which allowed him to get what he needed and update the live db.

To us, that is fully managed. Perhaps the things you mentioned are "managed" ? It's a shame there is so much confusion over this topic.



Regards,

Hi Karl - absolutely correct. Fully managed means fully managed - ie customers just deal with it like they would a large shared account - except the environment is dedicated to them... and they have zero technical expectations placed on them...

regarding that restore example you used - you really really really should look at r1soft's CDP solution. You can give clients access to their own backups and they can restore individual tables, etc from the DB right to their live site without issue...

[utropicmedia-karl]

Originally Posted by CartikaHosting

depends on what sort of management we are talking about right?

Double the cost? heck, the definition of fully managed dramatically changes from 1 provider to the next. I can see the price easily being double or triple for a real fully managed solution compared to scaled down "fully managed" definition.

How much does proactive monitoring cost?
How much does 24x7x365 proactive response cost? (ie techs are on the server before you contact them with a problem)
How about managed firewalls?
How about managed backups?
etc, etc, etc...

Price of managed hosting varies dramatically because the services being offered vary dramatically.



Hi Karl - absolutely correct. Fully managed means fully managed - ie customers just deal with it like they would a large shared account - except the environment is dedicated to them... and they have zero technical expectations placed on them...

regarding that restore example you used - you really really really should look at r1soft's CDP solution. You can give clients access to their own backups and they can restore individual tables, etc from the DB right to their live site without issue...

Thanks for the tip, but we use Ahsay and like it's feature set more. We did look at r1soft but it was too limited for what we wanted.

The issue with the restore was not that he wanted one table, but some rows from that table. I doubt r1soft is that granular and at last check it's not MSSQL aware.


For our fully-managed clients, we do have some technical expectations on them if they are running custom software or have some custom setups, but we have level 3 and 4 techs that respond to them right away and either help work them through their issues, help investigate issues or offer advice.



Kind Regards,

[cartika-andrew]

Originally Posted by utropicmedia-karl

Thanks for the tip, but we use Ahsay and like it's feature set more. We did look at r1soft but it was too limited for what we wanted.

The issue with the restore was not that he wanted one table, but some rows from that table. I doubt r1soft is that granular and at last check it's not MSSQL aware.


For our fully-managed clients, we do have some technical expectations on them if they are running custom software or have some custom setups, but we have level 3 and 4 techs that respond to them right away and either help work them through their issues, help investigate issues or offer advice.



Kind Regards,

Hi Karl, nice to see someone offering real fully managed services. Far and few between these days...

Re r1soft - it certainly handles mssql. We use it to backup everything except our freebsd servers - and this includes windows, linux, exchange, pgsql, mysql, mssql, etc...

You are correct however, it will not handle specific rows, just tables... We previously used ashay (and still do for FreeBSD) - found the restores to be much to slow and found the solution to lack real scalability - but, you are right, it does some things very very well - handles exchange very nicely as well and also like how well it can backup users PC's or customers local, onsite servers - I guess they each have their advantages - but, if you ever hit any limitations with ashay and want a real life working example of r1soft to take a look at - let me know and Ill get you a tour

Cheers for now...

[Steven]

Originally Posted by utropicmedia-karl

See, I agree with your definition, but we operate under a different one. Just for comparison, yesterday one of our fully-managed clients asked for us to restore a database from backup, but he only needed info from a few rows, so we restored it to a temp database which allowed him to get what he needed and update the live db.

To us, that is fully managed. Perhaps the things you mentioned are "managed" ? It's a shame there is so much confusion over this topic.



Regards,

I fully agree with you. I have a client who has several servers managed and we recently did the same thing except we went a big further. We dumped a backup into a temp database, extracted the column they needed and restored the column.

That is what managed hosting should be. In my opinion.

[TeleSouthNet]

Originally Posted by Toby H

First 2 there I agree with, thats really important, but the How long have they been in business could be a little unfair, since it potentially writes off all new startups which will stop them ever getting a foothold in the industry. Just becuase the company is new doesn't mean their equipment and staff aren't up to it!

Having been in business 11 years now I can agree with this statement as I have seen both good and bad new providers. However for such business critical ops as a managed server I wholeheartedly believe that you should choose a provider who has several very good recommendations over their short time in biz. And look carefully at their support forums or other verifyable elements of support response and compentance.

[Toby H]

Talking of this, it's something I'm going to have to work on over the coming months, which is why I raised it as an issue here to see the response