The business world is in the middle of some of the biggest changes in its existence with internet presence increasingly becoming a must, and in many cases becoming a bigger source of income than bricks and mortar.  At the same time, technology is rapidly developing and the skills needed to create suitable solutions are becoming more specialized as the complexity rises, With it, the cost to each company for employing skilled staff increases.  These changes are far from slow, moving at such a rapid pace that some of today’s successes are often leveraging technology that barely existed even as little as 2 years ago.  Gone are the days when simple static content HTML pages, created by the CEO’s cousin’s son, are considered effective or secure.

For many companies it makes sense to pay for a third party company to handle their website for them.  Originally that would involve paying one company to design, code, and maintain the software, and then another company to host a server in a data center and provide internet connectivity, whilst paying for a consultant or staff member to support the servers.

With budgets being tightened, its beginning to make less sense to use multiple companies when a single one could either suffice or surpass the level of service, with the additional benefits of full 24×7 support and also no longer having to be an umpire to a blame game with each side denying their area of responsibility is the cause of any failures.

The term “Managed Hosting” covers a multitude of different levels of support and types of solution with different kinds of support infrastructure required to provide, and depending on which company you choose, Managed can mean as little as “we’ll reboot it for you”.
At the normal lowest level you will get a managed service where the customer leases a server from the hosting company with their choice of base environment pre-installed, along with a connectivity solution.   The only support offered might be basic monitoring pings and possibly some port monitoring, along with some patch management, with the host providing on-site staff 24×7 to be able to carry out any reboots or service restarts as necessary.

At the highest level you have a “fully managed hosting”, or “managed application” where everything from the hardware right down to the code running the site, the connectivity and the hosting is handled by one company.  From the customers perspective they end up with little or no involvement in hardware and software decisions, and they’re often looking for someone to handle their application, be it internet or intranet, though such a service will come at a premium!

Here at Superb we don’t like to put customers in boxes, and we aim to offer a solution tailored to their needs.  Superb’s Professional Services Division comprise of experienced, certified engineers focused on the proactive server management of Managed Hosting customers.  Managed services include the management of firewall, backup using R1Soft CDP, OS Hardening, Advanced Port Monitoring, among others. We hope that by doing so our customers will find themselves in a position to take advantage of all the internet can offer to their business.