Complex Managed Hosting Vendor Comparison

There was a time when managed hosting meant little more than renting out servers in a remote data center. In its most basic form, colocation, the vendor provided nothing more than power, cooling and physical cable connections. Although colocation is still a viable service and business model, managed hosting has evolved far beyond its humble beginnings. This white paper from Connectria and Palmer Research looks at the experience various size companies have with complex managed hosting and compares the offering of several players in this market.

In its most sophisticated form, complex managed hosting; companies can outsource high-level IT functions such as OS management, virtualization, load balancing, performance monitoring (CPU, network and memory utilization), security and more. Some of the vendors that offer complex managed hosting can support multiple hardware and software environments, and even legacy applications.

However, some vendors that claim to be in the complex hosting market can provide only a small subset of these functions. As result of the disparities in technical know-how and experience, there is currently some confusion in the market as to exactly what complex managed hosting means, and what customers can and should expect from a potential vendor.

This paper explores what features were important to companies that were already involved with complex managed hosting or that were planning to become involved within the next year. It also compares compared the offerings of three major vendors in the market to get a sense of what features sophisticated vendors are offering right now. Click here to download this white paper.