Also known as: Fully managed hosting
Managed hosting is a service in which the provider supplies the server and also runs it for you — handling the operating system, updates, security, backups, and monitoring — so you manage only your own application.1
Overview
The line between managed and unmanaged hosting is who keeps the machine healthy. With unmanaged hosting (the typical dedicated server or plain VPS), the provider hands you a server and you are responsible for patching the operating system, configuring services, and responding to incidents.
With managed hosting, the provider does that operational work — often under a service-level agreement with guaranteed response times — and you pay a premium for it. The premium buys back time and expertise: no 3 a.m. patching, no scramble when a disk fails, and someone accountable for uptime. What you give up is some control, since you no longer touch the layers the provider now owns.
Where it fits
Managed and unmanaged are two ends of one axis; where a model sits determines how much operations work lands on you:
| Model | Provider handles | You handle |
|---|---|---|
| Colocation | Facility only | Hardware + all software |
| Unmanaged server | Hardware | OS, security, app |
| Managed hosting | Hardware, OS, security, monitoring | Application |
| SaaS | Everything, incl. the app | Just using it |
Managed hosting suits teams without dedicated system administrators, or those who would rather spend effort on their product than on server upkeep. It is more hands-off than colocation but less abstract than software as a service, where even the application is run for you. For a hobbyist running GopherTrunk, managed hosting is rarely needed — the capture node is yours to tend — but it can simplify a back end that stores and serves decoded data.
Sources
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Internet hosting service — Wikipedia, on managed versus unmanaged hosting models. ↩