Choosing a dedicated hosting for your website can be a good reason to celebrate. Now your site is big and popular enough for such type of hosting. To choose managed or unmanaged dedicated hosting is the first step on your road to prosperity and happiness. Here are the basic things to consider deciding which dedicated hosting solution is the best for you:
- the complexity of your site
- time you can spend on your site maintaining
- technical skills
If you want to host a blog, unmanaged hosting can be enough. However, if you want to maintain a website with plenty of pages that needs constant updates, managed dedicated hosting should be taken into account.
To Save Time or Money – What is Your Choice?
Let’s not forget about technical knowledge. You or your stuff should have an adequate skills to maintain a site if you choose unmanaged dedicated hosting. It is quite important to decide at once whether you are going to spend more time on various server administrative tasks or prefer to develop your business and site content.
However, for most users such a choice can be quite simple. If you or your company have a vast experience in server management, you don’t want to operate a data center or invest your money into server hardware, unmanaged dedicated hosting is for you. On the other hand, managed hosting allows you to take advantage of dedicated server without hiring professionals to maintain a server.
Fully Managed Dedicated Hosting Plans – Make Your Life Easier
If you don’t have full-time IT department to maintain the server, choose managed dedicated hosting without hesitation. However, this time the question is how many options you need to be managed by your host? The prices differ depending on the number of features you want to include into your “managed list”.
For example, server-side virus scanning can cost you $7 per month while for advanced server maintenance you should pay $80 per month or more. These prices vary from host to host, from one hosting plan to another. Thus, your task is to set the things that are the most important for you. And of course, don’t forget that hiring a professional programmer can be more expensive if compare with managed hosting solutions.
Here are the most popular dedicated hosting management services:
Server monitoring. This option make the hosting provider to track the performance of your server and depending on the level of managed hosting you buy, you will be either notified about issues occurred or hosting company will resolve them for you at once.
Disk backup. Choosing this option you can be sure that your data is backed up and all unnecessary or old files are removed.
Operating system updates. This time hosting provider applies updates and patches to guarantee your server runs quickly and secure.
Virus scans. The routine virus scans on your server’s hard drives are run by your hosting company.
Email management. This option provides you with such services as set up, managing and filtering your email accounts connected with your domains.
Security audits. Make sure to be notified by your host if any potential security problems occur.
Unmanaged Hosting Solutions – Skills Required
As you may see, there are really a lot of things you don’t think about when your site was hosted on shared hosting plan. Dedicated hosting is not only more advantages for you, it is also more responsibility. If you are sure in your programming skills or a vast experience of your staff, to get unmanaged dedicate hosting can be a good decision.
Otherwise, make sure to choose managed hosting at least with the basic features required to protect your server from viruses and back up your data in case some problems occur. It is quite important to do your best with all the features provided by dedicated hosting. Or it will be just a waste of resources… and money.