A website can be a costly endeavor. It takes time to:
- Plan and set up your environment.
- Find the right plugins or extensions.
- Build out the right functionality.
- Secure and update as needed.
- And constantly monitor it for vulnerabilities.
That is why managed hosting is so important.
But first, what is managed hosting? There are two types of managed hosting. There is server-side hosting, which covers only the server, and application management — this is what Nexcess does.
Managed application hosting goes beyond the server to cover items like malware scanning, plugin updates, and migrations. Like Nexcess, they’ll also likely have application-specific knowledge and expertise.
When looking for a managed application hosting provider, you need to consider these five factors.
What to Look for in a Managed Hosting Provider
1. Reliability
You can’t just go with any managed application platform. Some managed application companies leave most of the heavy lifting to you. They notify you if they find an issue, or write up a doc on how to secure your platform, but they won’t always be there to help in a real emergency. Their systems are set up more for awareness and management of notification rather than to mitigate issues.
👉 Top 10 Questions to Ask a Cloud Hosting Provider >>
Nexcess has many tools in place to make sure your site doesn’t hit a failure point due to a vulnerability, or a bad actor destroying your systems. Our team has built two-factor authentication encrypted access points that sit behind a web application firewall to keep unwanted traffic (like bots) away from your backend.
With Nexcess Managed WordPress or Managed WooCommerce, you can take advantage of the Visual Compare function. It makes sure all updates are completed and do not present any issues to your front end as well. If something does go wrong, our support team is constantly working to stay up to date with the latest exploit solutions.
2. Performance
One of the most important factors to the success of your site is speed and website performance. Unfortunately, some major brand name hosting companies don’t actually own the server structure they sell.
As “resellers” of major clouds like Google or AWS, they don’t get to optimize and completely configure the server structure to be as fast as it can be. They need to work within the confines of a third party that ultimately controls everything.
Nexcess owns and operates its own data centers. Having this ability allows us to structure our managed hosting cloud service specifically to your application. This allows us to modify your server backend for your site structure so you can deliver near-instant assets to your users easily.
Along with server structure, we built out specialized containers that let you add services, like ElasticSearch, to your accounts adjacent to your existing services without slowing down your front end. They can be deployed in seconds, are fully managed by our beyond management team, and are accessible over a secure cloud-only container network.
3. Support
You know your business better than anyone else. We make it our mission to know your site the same way. We call ourselves “The Most Helpful Humans in Hosting” for a reason. Problems will arise and when they do we have a team waiting around the clock for your call, text, chat, ticket, or email and we won’t rest until the problem is solved.
Why Hosting Support Is Important >>
Support is about fixing problems, not just replying to them and that is why you should never have to worry about an issue. We’ve built an experienced team of experts to manage your site for you, provide you with a stable platform, keep watch on site security, and help make sure your site is performing beyond your expectations.
4. Expandability
The reason you set up a site is to grow your brand. With brand growth comes increased traffic. Unfortunately, one of the major failure points for most sites is an influx of traffic their host can’t handle.
At Nexcess, we have built our Managed Application Plan to scale as needed up and down. Easily move up in plans without needing to deal with downtime just to migrate. Our container systems allow for additional software that can be added to your cloud solution to expand performance, functionality, and management.
What is Scalable WordPress Hosting? >>
Don’t need to move up for long? That is what Nexcess Auto Scale is for. Auto-scaling monitors your website and triggers a scaling event whenever traffic begins to exceed capacity of concurrent users (users who are doing the same action at the same time).
A scaling event adjusts the PHP process limit (also known as PHP workers) to accommodate bursts in user concurrency on your site. So when you promote flash sales, see activity from a post that goes viral, or prepare for seasonal spikes like holiday shopping, you can rest assured that your site can handle anything that comes its way.
5. Community
The most important thing about any managed application hosting company is how they give back to the community. Many of the applications hosted are open source and kept up to date by the many volunteers who live and breathe the app.
Your host should be no different. The Nexcess staff is full of contributors to application communities. From plugin authors to core contributors to top developers listed in Stack Overflow or Git, our staff lives to make these applications better for everyone.
Bottom Line
There are many reasons to start or move to Nexcess — these are just a few. We have many more features, add-ons, plugin bundles, and security tools to explore.
And if you’re currently locked in a contract with another host, we’ll cover your costs and buy you out of your plan. Switching to Nexcess is easy with our free white glove migrations.
Your success is the most important thing to us and we look forward to helping you get there.
The best way to see how Nexcess can improve your site is to talk to our experts and share the details of what you are trying to accomplish. Contact us today.