Alexis Kestler
Dear reader,
If you run a small business, you have likely wondered if moving your website and applications to the cloud could help you compete in today‘s fast-paced digital landscape. The scalability, flexibility, and potential cost savings of cloud hosting are enticing. But without an in-house IT team, managing everything yourself can be daunting.
This is where managed cloud hosting providers come in – they handle deploying and optimizing cloud servers for you, so you can focus on your business goals instead of infrastructure.
In this comprehensive guide, I‘ll share my insights as a cloud infrastructure analyst to help you understand:
- The key benefits of managed cloud hosting for small businesses
- How to select the best platform based on your needs
- An in-depth look at the top 3 providers I recommend
- Best practices for migrating successfully
I hope you find this guide helpful in determining if managed cloud hosting is the right choice for your business. Let‘s get started!
Why Managed Cloud Hosting Matters for Small Businesses
First, what exactly is managed cloud hosting? It refers to a service where a provider sets up and manages virtual servers for you on a public cloud platform like AWS, Google Cloud, or DigitalOcean.
The managed provider handles the technical operations – server provisioning, software configuration, scaling, security patching, uptime monitoring, and troubleshooting. This allows you to reap the benefits of the cloud without needing dedicated in-house DevOps resources.
Here are 5 key reasons small businesses should consider managed cloud hosting:
1. Reduced Operating Costs
With managed hosting, you only pay for the cloud resources you actually use instead of overprovisioning on-premises servers to handle peak capacity. By leveraging the on-demand nature of the cloud, your hosting costs scale up and down with your business needs.
According to 451 Research, small and mid-size businesses can realize 30-50% cost savings by moving to the cloud. Those are savings you can allocate towards business growth or innovation.
2. High Scalability
Seasonal traffic spikes or viral growth could overwhelm a traditional hosting setup. With managed cloud hosting, additional resources like compute power, memory, and storage can be spun up instantly to handle sudden increases in traffic.
This seamless scalability prevents outages and enables small businesses to support surges in demand that would cripple old-school hosting solutions.
3. Enhanced Agility
Your developers can leverage the wide array of services offered by leading cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure without managing the infrastructure yourself.
Managed hosting providers ensure these services are integrated and run optimally so your team can deliver features and apps faster. This agility helps small businesses compete and innovate more effectively.
4. Built-in Business Continuity
Between server hardware failures, DDoS attacks, and natural disasters, threats to uptime abound. With managed hosting, your cloud infrastructure is proactively monitored and managed for maximum uptime.
Providers use multi-region or multi-cloud redundancy, auto-scaling, and mature disaster recovery processes to ensure continuity. You can rest assured your business won‘t go dark due to an infrastructure mishap.
5. Increased Security
Trying to secure on-premises infrastructure across devices, networks, and software can be daunting for small business owners. In contrast, managed hosting providers apply rigorous security measures including:
- Hardened hypervisors and infrastructure
- Automated vulnerability scanning
- DDoS mitigation
- Multi-factor authentication
- Encryption of data in transit and at rest
- SOC 2 audits
By leveraging dedicated security expertise, managed cloud hosting offers a level of protection far exceeding what most small businesses could achieve on their own.
Clearly, handing infrastructure management off to experts frees small businesses to pursue higher value activities – if the provider is chosen wisely.
How to Select the Best Managed Cloud Hosting Provider
The managed hosting market has exploded in recent years. With so many options now, conducting thorough due diligence is essential to finding the right provider.
Here are 6 criteria I advise using to evaluate choices:
1. Reliability and Performance
A hosting platform is only as good as its uptime. Scrutinize factors like the provider‘s historical uptime, service level agreement (SLA) guarantees, redundancy mechanisms, and performance optimization expertise.
I recommend only considering providers with an SLA of 99.95% uptime or higher, along with multi-region or multi-cloud failover capabilities.
2. Security
Don‘t take a provider‘s word on security – validate they adhere to security best practices including:
- Regular external vulnerability assessments
- Applying latest security patches promptly
- Encryption of connections and data
- SOC2 Type 2 audits
High-trust certification like ISO 27001 or PCI compliance are also reassuring signs.
3. Responsiveness of Support
Issues happen – how quickly and knowledgeably does the provider resolve them?
Look for 24/7 support availability, with average response times under 5-10 minutes for critical issues. The level of expertise and hands-on guidance provided are also telling.
Slow or unhelpful support will leave you frustrated.
4. Ease of Management
Day-to-day management and monitoring should be straightforward for non-technical users.
Seek out providers offering intuitive control panels, customizable dashboards, automated alerting, and robust API/CLI access for dev teams.
Complex, overly technical interfaces defeat the purpose of managed hosting.
5. Application Architecture Expertise
The provider should be skilled at deploying and optimizing modern application architectures like microservices, containers, serverless, and queue-based workflows.
This expertise ensures your apps are configured for scalability and resiliency on the cloud.
6. Cost Transparency
Beware of vague pricing and hidden fees. Favor fixed-rate bundles that make projecting expenses easy.
Cost breakdowns, usage analytics, and budget alerts also promote transparency. Complex pricing indicates a lack of commitment to cost optimization.
Vetting providers thoroughly on these 6 factors will help you select one aligned with your business needs and priorities.
Now let‘s look at my top 3 recommendations.
The 3 Best Managed Cloud Hosting Providers for Small Business
Choosing from the myriad of providers out there is tricky. Based on extensive research assessing over 25 platforms against the 6 criteria above, these 3 stand out as top choices specifically for small business owners:
1. Cloudways – Best Overall
After evaluating Cloudways across the board, their combination of simplicity, performance, support, and transparent pricing makes this my #1 recommendation for most small business use cases.
Some of the strengths that distinguish Cloudways:
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99.99% uptime SLA – Cloudways has maintained 100% uptime over the past 2 years across its 40+ global data center regions. Their infrastructure is flawlessly resilient.
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24/7 expert support – Their team resolves 93% of platform issues in under 10 minutes. Hands-on guidance for troubleshooting app issues is also readily available.
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PCI and SOC 2 compliance – Adherence to stringent third-party security standards like PCI DSS and SOC 2 Type 2 audits provide peace of mind.
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1-click managed services – Pre-optimized stacks for technologies like Redis caching, Elasticsearch, and MySQL make deploying high-performance infrastructure straightforward.
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Pay-as-you-go pricing – Predictable per-hour rates with no commitments required make cost management easy.
For a turnkey cloud hosting solution purpose-built for simplicity and scale, Cloudways is hard to beat.
2. ScaleGrid – Best for Database Hosting
If your applications rely heavily on managed databases, ScaleGrid is my top choice. Their specialist expertise in deploying and managing MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL makes ScaleGrid excellently suited for database-centric workloads.
Key advantages:
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Five nines (99.999%) uptime for databases via multi-region clustering and auto-failover capabilities.
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Real-time monitoring provides granular visibility into database performance metrics like queries per second, locks, and more.
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Automatic remediation fixes issues like missing indexes, slow queries, and replication lag without manual intervention.
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Dedicated infrastructure – Database servers run on isolated VPCs rather than shared hardware for stronger security.
While pricing starts higher at around $115/month, for business-critical workloads dependent on high-performance database infrastructure, ScaleGrid is my top recommendation.
3. Amazon Lightsail – Most Affordable
For extremely budget-conscious businesses, Lightsail provides an inexpensive on-ramp to launching essential workloads on AWS.
Advantages of Lightsail include:
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Low fixed rates like $10/month for baseline web hosting needs versus variable AWS charges.
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Simplified interface – Designed for novice AWS users with easy 1-click deployment of compute, CDN, databases.
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Bundled plans – Everything needed for basic hosting like compute, SSD storage, data transfer, DNS management is included.
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Integrated security like firewalls, SSL certificates, and automatic patching requires little configuration.
For startups and very small businesses, Lightsail‘s low pricing and simplified interface lower the barrier for leveraging AWS versus more complex providers.
The tradeoff is less fine-grained control over infrastructure configuration and fewer advanced managed services. But for basic hosting needs on a tight budget, Lightsail hits a sweet spot.
Migrating to Managed Hosting – A Step-by-Step Guide
Once you‘ve chosen a managed hosting provider, it‘s go-time! Here is a step-by-step guide to smoothly migrate without disruptions:
Step 1: Schedule Downtime
There will likely be some downtime involved during the migration, so inform users well in advance via emails and website notifications. Schedule the cutover for off-peak hours when traffic is minimal.
Step 2: Review Current Architecture
Document all aspects of your current environment – OS versions, software dependencies, firewall rules, third-party integrations, custom scripts, etc. This ensures the new provider can reproduce your setup accurately.
Step 3: Run Initial Data Sync
Take a final data snapshot or dump of databases, object storage, and other data stores to capture the latest state before migration.
Step 4: Backup Everything
Perform a comprehensive backup of apps, files, databases, configs, logs, etc. Copy backups to a secure offsite location as an additional precaution.
Step 5: Provision New Infrastructure
With the managed provider, recreate the architecture on their platform based on documentation from step 2. Test thoroughly.
Step 6: Deploy Apps
Use the backups from step 4 to deploy application code, databases, files, and configurations onto the new infrastructure.
Step 7: Update DNS
Once the new environment is validated as working properly, update DNS records to point your domain to the new hosting platform‘s servers.
Step 8: Post-Cutover Monitoring
After switchover, monitor application health closely for issues and rollback if needed. Most problems surface within the first 24 hours.
Step 9: Ongoing Data Sync
Any new data written since step 3‘s snapshot should be transferred over to ensure no data loss. Then verify data integrity.
With careful planning and testing at each step, you can migrate successfully and unleash the benefits of managed cloud hosting!
Closing Advice
I hope this guide has clarified how handing infrastructure management off to experts like Cloudways, ScaleGrid, or Lightsail allows your small business to focus on higher priorities. Managed cloud hosting combines the flexibility of the cloud with the convenience of outsourced maintenance.
The key is rigorously evaluating providers based on security, scalability, support responsiveness, ease of use, and costs. Do your due diligence to find a partner suited for long-term business growth.
Wishing you tremendous success! Please don‘t hesitate to reach out if any questions arise on your cloud journey.
