Managed Hosting Service - About Managed Hosting Service & Reviews

Managed Hosting Service

Looking for information on managed hosting services? We've got you covered. On this page, we will explain what a managed hosting service is, and if it's a suitable option for you website. At the end of the article we've reviewed the top providers and ranked them accordingly. Jump to managed hosting service reviews.

What is a managed hosting service?

Managed dedicated hosting is an option for websites who have outgrown shared hosting, and have a strong enough online presence to require a dedicated server. With managed hosting, the server administration work is handled by the server host, rather than the company that owns the dedicated server. This allows the company to focus more on what matters - growing their website/company.

Do I need a managed hosting service?

If your websites deals with highly sensitive confidential information, or if you're currently on a shared hosting plan and are dealing with a lot of downtime or slow loading speeds, it may be time to upgrade to a dedicated hosting service. With dedicated hosting, your website does not share a server with any other websites. The server is dedicated ONLY to your website(s). This is the reason for the name dedicated hosting.

When upgrading to a dedicated server, you're faced with the decision of going with either a managed hosting service or an unmanaged dedicated server. Typically, an unmanaged dedicated server will usually have a cheaper price tag, but will require a lot of something else - time. With a managed hosting service, mostly anything you need installed, upgraded, or fixed, will be done so by the hosting provider. This can save you countless hours of working with your server and allows you to better spend your time growing your website/company. In our experience, going with a managed hosting service has been the best choice by far.

What makes up a high quality managed hosting service?

Reponse Time
One of the most important things in a managed hosting service provider is their response time. Say your server goes down and you send a ticket to your managed hosting service provider only to wait hours for a response or resolution. That is time people can't access your site, and time you're not making any money. A provider that can provide extremely fast response and resolution times is a provider you want to be with.

Highly Skilled and Knowledgeable Support Team
Another important quality is the skill and knowledge of your hosting provider's support team. It does no good to send a ticket to someone who is not qualified to fix your server when there is an issue. You want someone who can identify and fix the issue quickly without having to research or wait for someone else who is qualified to fix it.

Server Uptime
The #1 most important quality in a managed hosting service is their network uptime. A server that is down most of the time won't do anyone any good. Make sure the provider you're considering advertises atleast a 99.99% uptime, and has a SLA to refund you for any downtime that may occur.

So, who provides the best managed hosting service?

We've tested and reviewed the top managed hosting services and ranked them accordingly. We spent many months with each of these providers which was enough to show their pros and cons. Below are the results.

1.	Gigenet Managed Hosting Service Review
		Review: Our experience with Gigenet.com has been nothing short of perfect. The servers are blazingly fast, and the support response time is even faster. Whenever our server had an issue (which was very rarely), the gigenet support team was on top of it within minutes. The knowlegde of gigenet's support team, and their incredibly fast response times, are what keep us buying all of our servers from them. Pros: -Almost 0 downtime. -Extremely fast support response times. -Servers are ready very quickly, usually our server is ready a few hours after the order. -Highly competitive pricing Cons: -Absolutely none so far!
2.	Rackspace Managed Hosting Service Review
		Pros: -Rackspace has a good support team. -The response time was pretty good -Didn't enounter too many issues with the server. Cons: -For the price we paid, they didn't offer anything that we didn't already get from other dedicated hosting providers.
3.	LiquidWeb Managed Hosting Service Review
		Pros: -Highly knowledgeable support team. Cons: -Fairly highly pricing, didn't get anything extra for it.
4.	Softlayer Managed Hosting Service Review
		Pros: -Highly knowledgeable support team. -Fixed issues fairly quickly. Cons: -Whenever we needed additional software installed on the server, they charged a fee.
5.	The Planet Managed Hosting Service Review
		Pros: -Very little downtime. Cons: -Ticket response time is very slow.