Managed Dedicated Hosting - Essential for Your Small Business

Whether your small business is a hungry startup looking for a break or an established company navigating a tough economy, two things are true- you need to be competitive in a Web 2.0 business environment, and you probably don’t have the IT resources to do that as well as you need to. The good news is it’s never been easier to outsource your IT needs, and the first place to start is with managed dedicated hosting.

Unless your core service is application hosting, it makes no sense for businesses to purchase and manage servers in house. It was one thing to amortize hardware in the days of skyrocketing growth, but in an era of tightening budgets, the expense of servers and personnel to manage them can sap revenues. Compounding this, with steady advances in technology, businesses can’t afford to let their IT infrastructure stagnate. Lead, follow, or get out of the way, as the saying goes.

Managed dedicated hosting avoids this trap, giving you access to not only the latest hardware and application technology, but also to highly trained support personnel to run that technology for you. What would it cost to house your company servers in your own datacenter with 24/7 staffing, power and network backup, environmental control and more? Managed dedicated hosting lets you benefit from world class datacenter infrastructure at a fraction of the cost.

There are other advantages to a managed dedicated hosting service. Ancillary services like security and intrusion protection, managed firewalls and load balancers, and managed backup give you the flexibility you need, with plans that can be crafted to your exact requirements. Most providers will also offer application hosting for databases, Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, Lotus Domino, CRM solutions like PeopleSoft, and many others. With Software as a Service becoming more and more accepted, this trend will only continue to grow.

Superior support is another compelling factor. Your managed dedicated server is operated by highly trained, certified administrators and engineers. Application experts help you fine tune installations and resolve problems quickly and efficiently. Powerful control panels give you the ability to perform many tasks with a few simple mouse clicks for streamlined day to day tasks. Proactive monitoring helps eliminate outages and identify needed upgrades before bottlenecks occur. Adding value to all of these things is the redundancy and reliability you get from connectivity with multiple backbone providers.

Managed dedicated hosting is no longer a boutique service for niche customers. For savvy SMBs, managed dedicated hosting is a key aspect of their operations. By outsourcing IT needs and leveraging cutting edge technology, companies can focus on core business priorities, maximizing revenue opportunities and meeting the challenges of 21st century commerce.