In today’s digital environment, having a robust online presence is more critical than ever for businesses to succeed and remain competitive. Websites, web applications, e-commerce stores, databases, and other IT infrastructures have become indispensable for companies across industries to operate, serve customers, and drive revenue. 

However, setting up and managing servers, advanced IT software, hardware, security, backups, and network connectivity in-house requires significant investments in terms of specialized staff, technology, and other resources. This is where the value of managed hosting services comes in.

Best Managed hosting service providers offer reliable, secure, and optimized hosting environments without the high costs and headaches involved in maintaining servers in-house. This allows businesses to focus their resources on core priorities rather than constantly managing complex IT infrastructure.

In this comprehensive guide, we will delve into the concept of managed hosting, its key benefits, and specifically why partnering with a provider like Atlantic.net can be transformative for organizations of all sizes and sectors.

What Are Managed Hosting Services?

What Are Managed Hosting Services

A best managed hosting service provider is a company that owns, operates, and maintains all of the hardware, software, networks, storage, security, and infrastructure required to host, support, and manage websites, applications, databases, and overall IT environments on behalf of its clients.

The provider houses client servers and infrastructure within its specialized data centers. Ongoing management, monitoring, maintenance, updates, and 24/7 support are handled by the provider’s IT experts as part of the managed services contract. This enables clients to outsource the responsibilities that come with owning and operating servers in-house.

Importance of Hosting Services for Businesses  

Websites and web-based applications act as digital storefronts and portals, allowing companies to reach their customers online, anytime from anywhere. E-commerce sites empower them to sell products globally. Databases and IT infrastructure equip teams with the information, tools, and capabilities they need to perform business operations efficiently.

Given how heavily companies today rely on their IT environments to acquire and serve customers and conduct operations, it is imperative for them to have secure and optimized hosting in place. Superior hosting directly equals better overall business performance – including higher customer satisfaction, increased sales conversion rates, more streamlined operations, lower costs, and bigger profits.

However, while hosting is clearly critical, it is also highly complex and requires specialized expertise around hardware, software, networks, security protocols, backups, failover clustering, load balancing, managed cloud hosting, and much more.

Most companies do not have access to such advanced skills in-house. Best managed hosting service enables them to benefit from enterprise-grade hosting environments minus the major capital and operating expenses associated with building, staffing, and managing IT infrastructure internally.

What Is The Difference Between Managed And Unmanaged Hosting?

Difference Between Managed And Unmanaged Hosting

Best managed hosting service means a provider fully handles servers, updates, security, backups, and support for clients. It is like staying at an all-inclusive resort with tasks managed behind the scenes. Unmanaged hosting just rents server space to clients who then carry all the responsibility themselves, like at a basic hostel.

Most companies today choose managed hosting. The provider’s experts configure, monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize the hosting infrastructure.

This frees the client’s staff to focus on innovation and core business goals instead of doing intensive IT maintenance. However, a minority of technical teams still prefer unmanaged for greater control or customization.

The decision depends on available technical resources, budget, risk tolerance, and how much involvement is desired. Ultimately, the benefits of Managed Hosting is to reduce heavy lifting so companies achieve web infrastructure goals.

Managed Hosting, Businesses Expectations

The main benefit of managed hosting is handing off complex IT infrastructure duties to experts. Providers configure high-performance servers, advanced security protections, and optimized networks for clients.

Rather than attempting expensive in-house hosting, managed clients pay a provider to own and maintain hosting environments instead. This frees up client staff to focus on core business needs rather than constant server maintenance and troubleshooting.

Some more benefits of managed Hosting are its continuous performance monitoring, timely updates, 24/7 support, and even assistance with custom applications and databases to optimize operations. Factoring in long-term costs, most enterprises find partnering with a seasoned managed provider well worth the premium for enhanced capabilities and strategic focus.

Unmanaged Hosting; Trade Offs

With unmanaged hosting, providers just enable access to basic servers without additional services. Clients must handle all software, security, backups, maintenance, and management themselves.

Upfront costs are lower, but long-term expenses related to staffing, tools, and hardware accumulate over time. Unmanaged gives full control, which some technically advanced teams prefer for deeply custom projects, even if they are more labor-intensive.

However, most companies struggle uphill to support all hosting duties in-house and achieve enterprise-grade reliability, performance, and compliance without managed provider reinforcement. Still, for users on tight budgets or needing unfettered server access, unmanaged hosting remains a self-service option.

Choosing Between Managed and Unmanaged

The optimal hosting approach depends on each company’s technical expertise, budget, infrastructure goals, and compliance needs. Startups and small teams usually get the benefit of managed hosting since the provider handles security, maintenance, and scaling.

Unmanaged hosting offers lower short-term costs for those prioritizing flexibility or customization over comprehensive services, but the long-term burden is heavy. As technology complexes, the majority of regulated and non-regulated businesses increasingly select best managed hosting service to achieve web infrastructure goals without adding an IT headcount. 

Evaluate capabilities, strategic priorities, and total cost of ownership when deciding between the two models. Managed hosting momentum continues rising to offload overhead as digital disruption accelerates.

What Are Benefits Of Managed Hosting Services?

Benefits Of Managed Hosting Services

Now let’s explore some of the major advantages businesses can realize by partnering with best managed hosting service provider like Atlantic.net:

Enhanced Security And Compliance

Cyber threats represent one of the most significant risks facing companies in the digital age. Using the best managed hosting services provider is one of the best ways to protect critical IT infrastructure and business data.

Leading providers have comprehensive security controls in place, leveraging firewalls, VPNs, intrusion detection/prevention systems, DDoS mitigation, vulnerability testing, backups, and more. Physical data center security also safeguards servers.  

Atlantic.net adheres to strict security protocols and helps clients achieve and maintain compliance with standards like HIPAA, PCI DSS, and SOC 2 as needed. Their robust security enables teams to prevent data breaches, stop cyber attacks, minimize downtime, and avoid costly non-compliance fines.

Improved Performance And Reliability

Performance and uptime are critical for customer experiences and revenue. Best managed hosting service environments deliver maximum website speeds, optimized applications, and 99.9% or better availability.

Providers use premium hardware, advanced software, high-bandwidth connectivity, load balancing, caching, monitoring, clustering, failovers, and redundancies to optimize hosting reliability and efficiency. Atlantic.net leverages top-tier infrastructure to guarantee ultra-fast speeds and zero critical application downtime.

Expert Support And Management

Specialized providers handle all day-to-day hosting infrastructure management, enabling clients to focus on business priorities rather than getting bogged down in constant IT tasks.

Routine maintenance, troubleshooting, upgrades, backups, scaling, security, and more are all handled by dedicated engineers. Atlantic.net’s team serves as an extension of their client’s IT staff to proactively monitor and manage infrastructure around the clock.

Scalability and Flexibility

Reactive scaling can lead to expensive overprovisioning and underprovisioning. Best managed hosting service offers flexible plans and the ability to instantly scale storage, sites, servers, and computing capabilities up or down to accommodate changing needs. 

Usage-based billing means paying only for the resources leveraged each month. As requirements evolve, Atlantic.net makes scaling seamless, allowing businesses to pivot rapidly.

Cost-Effectiveness

For most companies, setting up and managing enterprise-grade hosting infrastructure in-house requires prohibitive capital investments and operating expenses. Transferring infrastructure, staffing, security, maintenance, and upgrades to a provider yields significant long-term cost savings and predictability.

Working with Atlantic.net eliminates large upfront costs through flexible pay-as-you-go plans. Ongoing costs are also minimized via the economies of scale and efficiencies managed providers can leverage. Businesses save substantially over trying to build comparable infrastructure themselves.

Why Does Your Business Need Atlantic.net?

What truly sets Atlantic.net apart is how they deliver customized solutions aligned with each client’s unique objectives, challenges, platforms, workloads, compliance requirements, internal resources, budgets, legacy systems, and plans.

Now we will cover key reasons businesses can trust Atlantic.net to transform their IT hosting and infrastructure capabilities:

Tailored Solutions For Various Industries

Leveraging decades of experience, Atlantic.net’s team takes the time to understand individual business challenges across industries like healthcare, finance, retail, legal, advertising, entertainment, accounting, real estate, and more.

This enables them to map out ideal hosting strategies incorporating the appropriate levels of availability, security, compliance, connectivity, storage, and other aspects vital for specific verticals.

Whether companies need HIPAA-compliant managed cloud hosting, highly secure PCI DSS-compliant dedicated server environments, international high availability configurations, or hybrid hosting architecture spanning colocation, cloud, backups, and complex managed application services – Atlantic.net specializes in tailored solutions.

Cutting-Edge Technology And Infrastructure  

Atlantic.net invests heavily in upgrading to the latest server hardware, security tools, storage systems, network connectivity, and data center infrastructure.

Their hosting platform provides quick access to bleeding-edge capabilities around artificial intelligence, blockchain databases, Kubernetes container orchestration, IoT integration, and more. This future-proofs client infrastructure while driving maximum application performance.

Proven Track Record And Reputation

With decades exclusively focused on Atlantic managed hosting service, Atlantic.net serves the needs of both longstanding enterprise corporations and innovative startup clients. More than 1000 customers globally trust Atlantic.net to manage their business-critical web infrastructure and applications.

Their proven expertise across industries, combined with an intense focus on client success, is why so many clients remain loyal for many years.

24/7 Customer Support And Monitoring  

Atlantic.net passionate in-house 24/7 support and engineering teams value understanding unique client contexts and requirements. This facilitates more strategic engagements over time versus just tactical issue resolution.

Proactive infrastructure monitoring, swift troubleshooting, fluid scaling, and continuous performance optimizations ensure all hosting environments receive the highest availability and priority at all times.

Value-added Services And Resources 

Rather than nickel and dimming clients for every Atlantic managed hosting service, it includes a wide array of value-added offerings to simplify IT management, including migration assistance, security resources, DNS and domain management tools, DevOps automation capabilities, backup and storage upgrades, monthly performance reporting, and more.

Atlantic.net strives to wrap clients in solutions rather than just sell piecemeal products.

FAQs

Still, have some questions? Here, we cover common queries businesses have around best managed hosting services and Atlantic.net specifically:

How much does managed hosting cost?

Atlantic Managed hosting costs a fraction compared to maintaining comparable enterprise infrastructure in-house when factoring in hardware, software, staffing, security, and capacity planning expenses. Plans offer usage-based monthly billing starting in the low hundreds for entry SMBs and going to the mid-thousands for large corporations.

What is the contract commitment?

Atlantic.net provides flexible month-to-month contracts, allowing clients to pivot strategic directions rapidly as needed. Shorter term one to three-year reserved instance contracts offer larger discounts to those with more predictable capacity needs.

How long does new server deployment take?

Leveraging state-of-the-art provisioning automation, Atlantic.net can have new hosting infrastructure and migrated applications online within 24-48 hours in most cases. Complex hybrid environments take more planning but still deploy rapidly.

Can you scale hosting up and down?

Vertical and horizontal scaling to accommodate seasonal traffic spikes, new sites, or application demands takes seconds with the Atlantic managed hosting service. Auto-scaling policies easily adjust dedicated server capacity as well.

What performance guarantees exist?

Stringent 100% network uptime, 2-hour hardware replacement, zero critical application downtime, and 15-minute technical response SLAs ensure Atlantic.net clients realize maximum infrastructure performance.

How does security and compliance work?

Atlantic.net adheres to ISO 27001, SOC 1 Type II, and SOC 2 Type II security standards across infrastructure and processes while assisting clients in achieving HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and GDPR compliance via controls like encryption, access management, data segregation, auditing, policy management, and awareness training.

The Bottom Line

Atlantic Managed hosting streamlines web environments better than in-house servers can achieve alone. Companies gain expert configurations optimizing speed, reliability, and compliance without added staffing. 

Atlantic.net shines through tailored hosting spanning the managed cloud hosting, dedicated infrastructure, and application services aligned closely with specific digital strategies. Local support assists from simple websites to mission-critical system complexes as needs grow over time.

All organizations deserve hosting that securely accelerates online goals; yet juggling maintenance and scaling slow progress. Trust Atlantic.net’s decades managing advanced hosting so internal teams stay focused on customers and innovation that drive the business forward. Their robust managed solutions empower companies to expand their digital presence smoothly and strategically.

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