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Managed Dedicated Hosting vs. Unmanaged Dedicated Hosting
One of the complicating factors in making the right hosting purchase these days is
whether or not your business needs Managed Dedicated Hosting or dedicated unmanaged
hosting.
The pricing for dedicated unmanaged hosting can be tempting at $99/month and
lower, but would you really be making the right choice?
That depends on what is important. Certainly if you are running a game server (ie,
quake, counterstrike, etc), an IRC server or any other extremely non-critical service,
then dedicated unmanaged hosting is probably fine.
If you are an extremely technical person with enough time on your hands to
manage a server yourself, then dedicated unmanaged hosting might be all right
even for an application that is only somewhat important to your business.
However, most companies will find managed dedicated hosting to be the superior
choice for important Web sites, databases and business applications.
Some purchasers will choose Managed Dedicated Hosting because they have made
a business decision to spend their time improving other areas of their operation
while outsourcing server administration to experts while others will do so because
they are unable to administer their own servers. Certainly operations wishing to
engage in more complex hosting technologies for their Web sites or applications,
such as application server load balancing and SQL clustering, will tend to prefer
to go with Managed Dedicated Hosting.
The Benefits of Managed Dedicated Servers
- Increased Stability & Uptime
- Enhanced Security & Data Protection
- Advanced Disaster Recovery Capabilities
Increased Stability & Uptime
While any comptent hosting firm will have good network stability and uptime
of at least 99.9%, Dedicated Managed Servers come with a level of technical
support that take the burden of actual server stability and uptime partially off
of your shoulders.
Managed Dedicated Hosting companies tend to provide constant server
monitoring, which will detect whether your server goes down. These hosts
will help get your server back up and running when they have detected it going
down. As a result, your server will have a much better chance of being up
all of the time at a Dedicated Managed Host. Most Dedicated Managed
Hosting firms will offer even more advanced monitoring systems for an additional
price that can watch actual ports and services on your server while keeping
track of processor utilization, disk space utilization and memory
utilization. Even actual applications themselves can be monitored.
Stability and security are always tied together, and dedicated managed
servers can often come with firewalls, intrusion detection systems and vpn
capability for the right price. These measures help keep hostile parties
from adversely effecting the stability of your machine.
Web server load balancing and database server clustering are options at
Managed Dedicated Hosting firms that can allow even the highest trafficked sites
to maintain stability, best performance and extremely high uptime.
Enhanced Security & Data Protection
As mentioned above, Managed Dedicated Hosting firms can help protect your
data in ways that many Dedicated Unmanaged Hosting firms cannot. By adding
a firewall in front of your server, you can restrict other parties from
access the server either in its entirity or through specific ports.
For example, if you were running an important Web site you might allow
everyone in the world to connect to your server via the Web, but would
you want anyone and everyone to be able to attempt an FTP
connection or an SQL connection? A firewall can limit the range of IP
addresses that may connect through certain ports. Therefore if your office
has a set range of IPs, you can restrict FTP and SQL to those IPs only.
Virtual Private Networks (VPN) is a great option to increase security.
It allows data to be transmitted from your location to your server through an
encrypted connection. This is perfect for people transferring sensative
data across the Internet. VPNs are also used by those in the scenario
described above who need to connect securely to.
Advanced Disaster Recovery
Traditional data backups, while sufficient for many small-scale business sites,
may not be enough for your mission-critical venture. INetU provides managed backup
services that are more rigorous then traditional backups. They include open file
agent backups, database aware backups, online application backups, offsite backups
and CD-ROM data burns. For improved fault-tolerance, INetU also offers Redundant
Arrays of Independent Disks (RAID) protection. A server with RAID will copy data
constantly to redundant hard drives in a machine, creating drives with duplicate
data. In case of the failure of one drive, the server automatically begins using
the second. INetU will also install hot-swap drives and warm spare servers for
Total Server Management™ clients.
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