Lee Smith asked:


Managed hosting is a type of outsourcing to ensure that your business websites function correctly 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Outsourced hosting is a necessity for many commercial organisations, as IT knowledge is usually minimal and the costs are significantly higher to host in-house and therefore outsourcing is essential to guarantee that server uptime is almost one hundred percent.

There is a large number of hosting companies offering managed hosting to various clients from all over the world. Many hosting companies provide their services through dedicated servers and the server uptime is almost one hundred percent. Leased servers are also available from some of the hosting companies exclusively for many businesses that require dedicated applications or database applications. Hosting service providers also manage hardware maintenance and network security, bandwidth and site monitoring.

Websites generally require managed hosting for smooth functioning of the website and any application or email traffic that is necessary.

There are generally two types of hosting – one is Windows hosting and other Linux hosting. There are several advantages of managed hosting and depending on the requirements, suitable hosting can be selected for a specific website. Generally a team of professionals looks after the managed hosting and it is good for you to find a reputable and honest company that offers their outsourcing services at the most cost effective rates. Many new companies are coming up in this high growth sector area and you have to ensure that you balance price with professionalism and server infrastructure.

A commercial, managed hosting company provides detailed IP addresses of website visitors during the entire month as well as also providing visiting trends, anti virus, spam control and daily backups. Website statistics or analytics are very useful, especially for commercial websites. Many Windows and Linux hosting providers offer full database support and this is vital to the stability of your websites applications.

Linux hosting provides many features and many people prefer it to Windows hosting. All commercial service providers generally have twenty four hour customer support through phone or email and provide a personal control panel for easy and efficient administration.
Service providers have support in almost all areas such as Perl, PHP, MySQL, CGI bin, SSH access and Python. Some additional features such as POP, SMTP, Webmail, Anonymous FTP connections and FrontPage extensions may also be provided to the customers.

Service providers have dedicated IP addresses and excellent database support and therefore in our opinion Linux hosting provides many additional features. So, it is necessary for large commercial organizations and business houses to go for managed hosting as it provides not only hosting in a dedicated server, but all types of customer support that is required for smooth running of the website. Although Windows and Linux hosting are available, in our opinion Linux hosting is a better option.