Managed servers

Managed server and unmanaged server services refer to dedicated servers and cloud VPS and
refer to the type of system management.

As you can imagine, managing a server requires specific skills. That’s why the choice between
these two solutions depends on your needs and the skills you have to deal with the management
of the machines.

In this article, Managed server: what it is and what’s included?, we’ll see what is the difference
between having a managed server and an unmanaged server.

What does it mean to choose a managed server?

If it’s time to choose a hosting you need to know the differences between the different
solutions. Let’s start by clarifying that choosing a managed server service means being able to
completely entrust the management of your server to the provider.

In a VPS cloud hosting or a dedicated server this means that you don’t have to have knowledge
from system admin or can’t hire a systems engineer who can manage the server.

The entire management is provided to you by the provider who will take care of updates and
maintenance, but also monitoring the status of the server.

With managed services the management is completely handled by our technicians. If you have
any problem you just have to open a ticket and it will be solved, as far as management is
concerned it will be just like using a shared plan.

Ease of management is just one of the commonalities between plans that may seem very
different from each other.

Differences between Managed Server and Unmanaged Server

As we’ve seen in a managed server you won’t have to deal with the management or
maintenance of the server. If you don’t have the necessary skills to manage the server, choosing
a managed server will make your life much easier.
The first difference between the two systems concerns the access to the server. With a managed
server, to access the server you can use the control panel and you don’t have root permissions.
With unmanaged services instead, you have Root or SSH access to the server.

Server management

An unmanaged server will have lower costs than a managed server, but will require many more
resources in terms of time and labor.

In unmanaged servers, you’ll be in charge of installation, upgrades and server reboots. You’ll
have to manage security and troubleshooting. Mitigating DDoS attacks and recovery in the
event of disaster recovery are part of what you’ll be responsible for.

This means that you will have to have technicians who can intervene at any time in order not
to risk having the site down and having to deal with everything that follows in terms of
economic and image damage. Therefore, your staff will need to have not only the skills
necessary to manage the machine, but also the time available to do so.

In any case, even with an unmanaged service, you can turn to the provider for paid support. In
this case, in fact, the intervention will not be included in the plan, since it is an unmanaged
service.
Of course, if any hardware repairs are needed, the provider will take care of it even in
unmanaged services.

Having a managed server, on the other hand, means you can rely on the provider’s support for
free and delegate all these operations to the technicians at any time. By choosing a managed
service, your server is in safe hands because support already takes care of proactive
monitoring and problems are resolved even before you contact support.

With a managed server you are guaranteed the uptime of your site, while you will have to deal
with any disruptions if you choose an unmanaged solution.

Customization possibilities

On the other hand, the unmanaged service gives you more freedom on the server, with complete
access and the possibility to choose the operating system.

But this does not mean that you can not still customize the server according to your needs even
with a managed service. A dedicated server gives you total freedom in choosing the server
allowing you to install all the software needed for your site. Only in this case, instead of having
to deal with the installation yourself, our technicians will take care of it.

The choice between a managed and an unmanaged server depends on your needs and the skills
of your team. If you are not sure which solution is right for you, you can always contact us and
ask for a consulting session.

Why choosing a hosting is an important decision

The quality of hosting is essential if you want to have a professional website. Your website is
like a business card and must reflect your company’s image.

You would never want to give an unprofessional image of your company with a slow site. In
the same way, your website must be always usable and the accessibility to users must be
guaranteed in a constant way.

What if you have problems? The quality of a hosting is also measured by taking into account
the speed and efficiency with which the problems of its customers are resolved.

Making sure that your site is always online and that everything works properly is crucial to the
user experience.

When choosing a website provider, you need to consider these three main factors: speed, site
uptime guarantees and the timing of support.

When you find yourself having to choose a hosting, however, you need to consider your needs
specifically. Not all sites are the same, some need more resources, others need to support high
traffic.

These are elements that should not be underestimated when you go to choose a hosting or a
specific plan because it is important that it best suits your needs. Let’s see, therefore, how to
go about choosing a suitable plan.

Which plan to choose

At SupportHost we offer different plans, I realize that this can be confusing in some cases, but
it is necessary to offer solutions that meet the different needs.

Factors to consider

When choosing a hosting we need to consider several factors:

 The system requirements of our website. Will we be using WordPress, Drupal or

Joomla for our site or will we be using another software that has different system
requirements?
 Space requirements. You need to choose a hosting based on the space you need.
  The “heaviness” of our site. Do we make a corporate site or a simple blog? Or do we
want to create an eCommerce site with a multitude of plugins connected to an
external management system?
 The number of visits. Do we expect a few visits per month or thousands of visits per
day?

By analyzing these factors we can make a precise decision for our website.

System Requirements

Some software needs special libraries or configurations. If this is the case of the software you
want to use (it’s a very particular case) and these libraries are not available in the shared plans
then the only possible solution is a dedicated solution, like a VPS cloud hosting or a dedicated
server.

In this case, the best option is to contact our support indicating the list of requirements so we
can evaluate together the most suitable solution for your specific case.

With a dedicated server or a cloud, you can also choose between a managed plan where the
server management is entirely up to the provider, or an unmanaged one where you can choose
which operating system to install, but where you’ll have to take care of managing the server.

Space needed

This parameter is very easy to control. All you have to do is check with your provider how
much space your site is using, and get a plan that offers enough space for your site.

It is a simple mathematical account and not an evaluation.

Heavy websites

Not all sites are the same. In some cases, you are creating your own business site or blog that
will use a few plugins resulting in a lightweight site.

In other cases, you need to use special plugins or heavy software.

Since it is a PHP software (in most cases), every time a request is sent to the server, some
calculations are made to generate the HTML code of the page and send the HTML to the
browser.

If you use a lot of plugins, or if you use plugins that do a lot of calculations, the work on the
server will be more. That is, each visit to your site will consume more resources (CPU, RAM,
Processes, I/O).

As a general rule, if you have an eCommerce site we recommend a WordPress hosting plan or
a semi-dedicated hosting plan, while if you have a WordPress site without a large number of
plugins (let’s say less than 10) shared hosting is fine.

Number of visits

This parameter is very important. Depending on the traffic your site has you may need a more
or less powerful solution. each visited page uses resources according to the number of
calculations the server has to do.

It goes without saying that the greater the number of visits the greater the number of
calculations that must be performed at any given time.

This is one of the factors to take into consideration when choosing cloud vs shared.

To give a benchmark: a blog or business site with 500-1000 page views per day and a caching
plugin can be hosted without problems on a shared plan.

How to choose a hosting

To understand what to look for when choosing the perfect hosting for your site, let’s start with
the most common mistakes. Let’s see which services to avoid and which ones to focus on.

Choosing a web host: which ones to avoid

From your choice, you should exclude the services offered by companies managed by a single
person. In these cases, in fact, you will never have 24-hour assistance.
The risks of having problems that last for hours are high because one person can manage
everything but certainly cannot do it for 24 hours a day.

If you want a reliable service you have to bet on a structured company that can guarantee you
proper assistance.

To give you an example, relying on a webmaster who resells a webspace could be the cheapest
choice and be advantageous at first, but not the most forward-looking.

If you do have problems, it is important that the support you receive is timely and competent.
This is why it is best to stay away from improvised services.

Choosing a web host: which ones to rely on

Where do you start? First, you should do some research on the company offering the hosting
service. Figure out who is behind it and how many years it has been in business.

This way, you exclude one-man companies and can choose from companies that have been in
business for years. Don’t rule out that a company just entering the market might surprise you,
but one already established and chosen by many other customers is (almost) certainly
synonymous with reliability.

For this reason, the next step in choosing a hosting is to check reviews. Don’t just rely on
what’s written on the site, because they won’t always be reliable information, so it’s better to
do more research.

To get to know the opinions of customers, you can rely on platforms that collect reviews and
verify their reliability, such as HostAdvice and Trustpilot.

Reviews give you an immediate idea of the strengths and weaknesses of a service. You can
also check the trend over time and understand if the company is aiming to improve the service
or if they are letting go.

Another thing you can do after you’ve selected a few companies is to try sending a request for
information.
Do this even if you don’t actually need to ask for anything. This way you can get an idea of the
response time.

If you contact the company, you may be able to understand how the support is structured. You
could, in fact, be able to understand if there is only one operator to manage the assistance or if
you are in front of more organized support.

It is better to aim for a service that can offer you support 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
Another aspect to take into consideration when choosing a hosting is the possibility to try the
service and then decide whether to stay or not. In most cases, a money-back guarantee is offered
to the customer, but not always, so keep that in mind.

Remember that if the hosting includes the registration of the Internet domain, the cost of the
domain will not be refunded.

For this reason, if you want to try a service, but you are not sure of your choice, you can opt
for a plan that does not include the domain and arrange for it separately. This way, you
can transfer the domain only after you have tried it.

Alternatively, you can see if a free trial of the service is available. With SupportHost you can
take a free, no-obligation 14-day trial with our WordPress hosting. At the end of which you
freely decide whether to purchase a plan.

Choosing a hosting: frequently asked questions

Domain and hosting with different providers: is it convenient?

Mainly depends on the service you’re going to choose. In some cases, as in ours, the domain
is included with hosting. For this reason, not only it wouldn’t make sense to buy the domain
separately, but you would also spend more money.

Making this kind of choice could be convenient in some situations because you would have the
possibility to manage the domain independently. It could be useful in case of a site migration
because it would simplify things.
You can, therefore, decide to keep the domain and hosting separate if you know how to manage
the domain and you have particular needs.

In most cases, however, especially for less experienced users, it is better to rely on a single
provider for domain and hosting.

What to do if you don’t have access to hosting

A quite common situation is to realize that you don’t have access to your hosting. There are
cases in which the management is entrusted to a webmaster and the owner of the site is not
really in possession of the data to access the management.

Instead, it is very important to be able to access the hosting and also keep an eye on the
deadlines. Especially regarding the expiration of the domain itself so that it can be renewed in
time. In case it expires without you realizing it, in fact, you will also have to deal with the
recovery costs.

As far as the domain is concerned, the best option is to register it in your own name instead of
delegating it to a third party. This way, there is always the possibility of recovering the access
data by contacting your provider.

How to transfer a site from one hosting to another

If you need to transfer your site because you’ve decided to change hosting, the ideal situation
is one in which the uptime of the site is not affected. It is important, in fact, to avoid the site
being offline during the procedure. In order to transfer the site, you must first move the files
and the database of the site. Once the moving of the files is completed, a check is done to verify
that the site is working properly. If you need to transfer your site I have written an article
explaining how to transfer a WordPress site and one explaining how to do the email
transfer.

At this point you do a check on the email accounts, checking to make sure they are receiving
emails without any problems.

The last thing to do is to change the pointing of the domain, directing it to the new server.
Generally, the time of transfer of a domain is 5 days. In the case of .it domains, however, the
transfer takes place overnight, while for .eu domains it is immediate.

In these cases, in order to have the time to transfer the files and to check again that the transfer
has been successful, you can temporarily block the transfer of the domain.

To do this, you can use an incorrect auth-code, which is the authorization code you need for
the transfer. As long as you don’t enter the correct code, the transfer won’t take place and you
can finish the verification before completing the procedure

Who needs a VPS Hosting Cloud plan?

If your site has large volumes of visits or has special needs, you have to choose a solution such
as a VPS cloud hosting (also called virtual machine or VPS hosting) or a dedicated servers.

Unlike a shared hosting service, a cloud VPS plan offers dedicated resources. You can
also customize the service according to your needs, choosing for example which operating
system you want to use and which software to install on your server.

If your website continues to grow you can easily increase the limits of your account. You can
upgrade it to a bigger plan at any time simply by paying the difference. All VPS cloud hosting
accounts are hosted in our datacenter in Europe and USA.

VPS Cloud hosting, Managed or Unmanaged?

Cloud VPS plans offer maximum customization possibilities. If you choose a managed cloud
hosting plan you will have a control panel at your disposal, and we will take care of the server
management. For you, it will be like using a shared hosting account. If, on the other hand, you
can take care of server management, an unmanaged plan offers even greater customization
possibilities because it even gives you the opportunity to choose which operating system to
install.

With a VPS cloud hosting managed plan you don't have to worry about anything, everything
related to the server is our duty. We take care of all server management issues, plus we provide
you with the same level of support we offer on shared hosting accounts. Therefore, you can
focus on your website, we will take care of the server and its management.

You have to consider that if you choose an unmanaged plan you have Root access, and you
can do whatever you want with your server. The unmanaged plan has a lower cost than the
managed vps cloud, but you need to have the necessary skills to manage it.

UnManaged Managed

Access type Root Control panel

Who it is suitable for? Experienced user Average user

Operating System Your choice CentOS 7

Managed Hardware and Network ✔ ✔

Upgrades/scalability ✔ ✔

24/7 human intervention in case of ✔ ✔

failure

99.99% hardware uptime guaranteed ✔ ✔

99.9% uptime guaranteed ✘ ✔

Security Updates ✘ ✔

CSF Firewall Configuration ✘ ✔

Free Support ✘ ✔

Proactive support ✘ ✔

Free transfer ✘ ✔

Redundant DNS Cluster ✘ ✔

Support using the control panel ✘ ✔

Server Hardening and Optimization ✘ ✔

Installation of additional software ✘ ✔

 UnManaged Managed

Ability to request specific configurations ✘ ✔

Disaster recovery procedures ✘ ✔

Restore from backup ✘ ✔

PHP recompilation ✘ ✔