How Much Should Quality Managed Hosting Actually Cost You?

How much should you pay for managed hosting?

If you search hard enough on Google, you’ll soon start to see that managed hosting is available at a huge range of different price points.

Prices range from as low as $10 per month to over $25k per month for the WordPress VIP service.

The cheapest prices are often a result of cost-cutting on the part of the host to maximize profits. If you see fully managed hosting cost under $50 per month, it’s generally a warning sign. It’s likely that the host is either using retrofitted desktop “servers” as opposed to enterprise-grade servers or they’re using cheap outsourced support teams without experience and proper customer service training.

Many managers and executives try to minimize costs and keep expenditure as low as possible. That’s not necessarily a bad thing because many of those savings can be passed on to customers, but it can also cause problems. Following a cost-driven business model while shopping for hosting can be extremely risky.

By opting for a cheaper web host, you sacrifice quality.

And when you sacrifice quality, you start to lose money — and that can lead to a drop in online revenue if your site is too slow or offline all the time.

“Managed” vs. managed

As is the case with “cloud” hosts that don’t actually have cloud infrastructure, many hosts are cashing in on the term “managed” and providing poor or non-existent management.

These hosts are managed in name only (MINO).

Avoid them like the plague.

The difference between a quality managed host and a MINO host pretty much comes down to whether they deliver a positive return on investment for your business.

You shouldn’t feel as if you’re a nuisance or find that you’re still managing the server yourself.

The best managed hosting providers:

• Provide fast support
• Provide conclusive solutions to issues
• Deliver satisfactory server performance with minimal downtime
• Monitor your security
• Solve all of your day-to-day server maintenance needs
• Have data protection and disaster recovery plans
• Understand the special needs of your business, field, or industry
• Provide unsolicited feedback and suggestions to improve your hosting

Quality managed hosts see themselves as your business partner and not just as a supplier.

After all, they know that when your business excels, they do too.

They’ll ask you questions like:

• What applications are you using?
• What’s your vertical?
• What are your performance targets?
• What’s your RPO/RTO objective?

You know you’re speaking to a quality host when they start to ask questions like these because it shows that they’re trying to understand your business.

You can also judge a host by the quality of their conversation, because the best hosts also know how to communicate highly technical subjects in a clear, concise manner that anyone can understand.

Why do businesses, ecommerce shops, agencies (and even developers) prefer to pay more for managed hosting?

Let’s be honest: Even when you’re a professional, websites aren’t easy to manage. 

And there are several reasons for that. Running a website requires resources in the form of time, money and effort, and all of this has to happen against a backdrop of deadlines and pushy clients.

Servers are more complicated than desktop computers, and desktops can be frustrating for even the savviest and most experienced of users. So you can imagine how infuriating it can be to deal with unexpected server problems when you’re already working flat out.

Luckily, there’s an answer to your problems: managed hosting.

Managed web hosting has existed since the 90s, and it’s often been the go-to solution for webmasters, businesses, and developers because they don’t want the burden of having to manage their servers, preferring instead to focus on the actual site.

Even experienced administrators often opt for managed hosting because it gives them an extra pair of eyes and hands. It’s that added layer that helps to give you peace of mind and the best performance possible.

Next…

By now, you should understand a bit more about managed hosting pricing and have a good idea whether it’s the right decision for your business.

In part four, we’re going to share some more tips on specifically what to look for when shopping for managed hosting.

EuroVPS is, of course, an excellent managed VPS and managed bare-metal dedicated server host.

We use true cloud architecture on all of our VPS and shared hosting.

Our bare-metal solutions are available both individually or in a private cloud cluster.

We also have true 24/7 on-site support staff and network engineers who provide management to freelance developers and major corporations alike.

Everything we discuss here is what we do, and it’s what we’ve been doing since 2004.

Got questions?

Let us know.

We’re always happy to answer them.