What is Managed Hosting?

[Chris]

could someone who knows what he/she is talking about, DEFINE what "Managed Hosting" is actually about in comparison with (obviously) UNMANAGED Hosting...

[Jarrid]

When I think of managed hosting I think of a built-in admin with the service to do just about anything/everything needed for the server within reason. To me this includes but is not limited to:

Securing server

Proactive mointoring (ie. not waiting until I submit a ticket to fix a problem)

Firewall installation, configuration, and modification at my request

Updates as soon as possible and considered stable for the
Operating System/Control Panel for ALL services and common 3rd party applications (apache, proftpd, directadmin, and services such as Zend which could be considered 3rd party)

Optomizing the configuration files when needed as shown by the monitoring. If you see we have 1000 clients now (just a random number) you should tune the MySQL and Apache conf's for me.

Anybody else have stuff to add?

[Hostbiz]

I think thats basically it in a nutshell Jarrid .. When ever I think of managed at least I just think of it simply as a web hosting company providing any number of services within capiability for their dedicated servers. So managed hosting can generally just be thought of as having the space and freedom of a dedicated server, but with the perks and services that are provided to shared-server packages.

[Tom]

Well for me I enjoy admining my own machines, but to somebody that doesn't it would be a higher value than an inhouse admin IMHO

[Matt]

I think he meant "Hosting" rather then servers. Some places claim to offer "unamanaged" Shared Hosting. Mabye I'm reading it wrong though.

[Chris]

Originally Posted by Matt

I think he meant "Hosting" rather then servers. Some places claim to offer "unamanaged" Shared Hosting. Mabye I'm reading it wrong though.

"Unmanaged Shared Hosting"??? How would that be... you'd have to guess the port the CP runs on?