Managed VPS Website Hosting

Our Managed VPS Webhosting Plans are for serious business people, hosting websites that do serious business.

What is a Managed Virtual Private Server?

Well, you’ve probably seen or heard of ‘data centres’ which are massive warehouse-like buildings with rows upon rows of racks, containing hundreds and thousands of servers all connected to the internet that hosted our websites and applications.

10-15 years ago, to run a high-performance website, we used to have to rent space in one of these data centres, purchase server hardware and hire someone to physically and virtually manage them for us. Those folks were called colocation managers - highly skilled technicians available 24/7 to help out with any technical issues.

These days, with the advent of high levels of server automation and Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers such as Amazon Web Services and Digital Ocean etc, we no longer need to have to rent rack space in a specific data centre building - now we just rent space ‘in the cloud’, which could be in many different data centres across the globe all at once!

We call that ‘abstraction’ - taking away the bottom few layers of hardware and operating system responsibility so that all you have to manage is the software itself.

However, even with server automation, to get the best performance out of our business websites, we still need to have someone managing our server instances so that it does what we need it to do to support our website or application.

Server managers now make sure that the software that runs your business site is fit for purpose, updated and kept secure so that it stays fast, responsive and available to your internet visitors 24/7.

We provide server management to you as the business-owner - a customised hosting solution to house your business website or application.

Why would I need a Managed VPS over wholesale cPanel hosting?

There’s nothing wrong with wholesale hosting per-se - only that it is generic legacy hosting technology that does everything pretty well, but nothing spectacularly well.

A cPanel hosting server may host up to several thousand different websites on one server. It’s cheaper because hosting companies can ‘stack em and pack em’ into a single server to reduce their costs and maximise their profits.

Again, nothing particularly wrong with doing this, but you’re sharing a single internet address or IP address with all those other sites - which means that if any of them are doing something in poor taste - like spamming other people or hosting malware - then the IP address that you share may get flagged as ‘malicious’ on malware or email spam monitoring sites.

Most hosts do a pretty good job of managing this risk - but it does happen and some people’s sites can suffer downtime as a result of this.

Larger companies and businesses that rely on quality hosting and highly available websites to do e-commerce etc mitigate these risks by managing their own servers.

cPanel servers also restrict how much you can ‘surge’ at any point in time. If you have a particularly popular post, product, offer or file resource that attracts a large number of visitors, your cPanel host may restrict how many of these visitors can load your site at any one time. They do this to protect the other sites on the server, not specifically to constrain yours - 

However, your business' application may need to surge from time to time or this could even be part of your overall business model.

In that case, what you need is a private server that can adjust to your needs and not fit in with the masses of other sites on the web.

Some more security conscious businesses also opt for a Managed VPS so that they keep absolute control over what data is kept on the server, and to reduce the likelihood that they will be swept up in a more general attack on a bulk server with a single IP address.

How much does a Managed VPS cost to run?

Well, as you've no doubt figured out, it's more expensive than wholesale hosting - and with good reason!

Virtual Private Servers are typically priced by the resources they consume and reserve on the platform. For example, you'll typically pay twice as much for 2 CPU's versus one CPU, for 4GB of available RAM versus 2GB and also for additional storage.

Then there's the management layer which raises the service above just the cost of reserving hardware. Everything is customised for your needs and largely automated, though there's still a requirement for a supporting human to be alerted and intervene if there's a software issue or a hosting gremlin to work out.

We provide industry-leading server management engines and monitoring for all of our servers, plus our customised application security and monitoring solutions which can keep tabs on almost anything on your site including changes in response times, content changes and access security.

Onboarding a new Managed Server

We can spin up a new server instance pretty quickly for almost any kind of website or application, but we do need to know what you’d like to host there so that we can build the right platform for you - so we like to have conversation with you before we leap right in.

As a guide, a couple of smaller sites or blogs are easily handled by a small, single CPU/1Gb RAM server, though eCommerce stores and more processing intensive sites should be run with more memory and at least dual CPU's for comfort and so that you don't leave your visitors hanging!

So just reach out and we can discuss your Managed VPS needs over a video or phone call and get your shiny new server running in no time!