Compare Unmanaged Hosting

What is Unmanaged Hosting?

When you are new to web hosting, the sheer volume of options can be overwhelming. Unmanaged hosting is the term used by the hosting industry to describe hosting plans over which you have almost complete control.

Unmanaged hosting plans don’t include any extra hand-holding. The hosting provider gives you access to the server to host your site, and you are on your own! While that might sound like a bad thing, that isn’t necessarily the case – depending on your level of technical expertise. Unmanaged plans are truly geared toward people with the technical skills and knowledge to install their own control panels, sites, and software with little to no help.

Who Is A Good Candidate For Unmanaged Hosting?

• Large companies with their own IT departments
• Managed IT service providers
• Web developers

If your business is in need of enterprise-level solutions but your own employees will handle server management, then you really have no reason to pay more to get managed services. In addition, if you want full control over the software on your servers could benefit from unmanaged virtual private servers. They’re lower in cost than dedicated servers, and they allow for developer control of features such as scaling, updates, and site backups.

Unmanaged Hosting Vs. Managed Hosting

As we mentioned above, unmanaged hosting is hosting where you are in control. Your hosting provider gives you the server space, and you are responsible for self support, backups, updates and keeping your server secure.

When you have a managed hosting plan, your provider will usually offer you the following service benefits:

• Premium technical support
• Routine backups
• Proactive monitoring
• Software updates, and so on

Those services also often come with additional fees. Often, fully managed plans are only offered with dedicated servers. They almost always cost significantly more than unmanaged plans.

Many hosting providers offer plans that are unmanaged, fully managed, and somewhere in between. Unmanaged plans are generally the least expensive to you, because they require the least involvement from your provider. Even if you choose an unmanaged plan, you will probably still have some level of technical support included. You may even be able to add on premium support services for a fee that is still far less than the cost of a fully managed plan.

Benefits Of Unmanaged Hosting

If you really know what you’re doing when it comes to server management, it’d be hard not to utilize an unmanaged hosting plan from your hosting provider.

Below are seven reasons you can benefit from having an unmanaged hosting plan.

• Full range control of your server and protection of your information
• Server accessibility from remote locations
• Unmetered bandwidth
• Pay-as-you-go access to memory, softwares, and storage
• Customization capabilities to meet the needs of you or your clients
• No need to rely on unresponsive support from a third party
• No shared or pooling of resources

Unmanaged VPS Hosting: The Best Bang For Your Bucks!

For businesses with the staffing capacity and for technology professionals with the know-how, unmanaged hosting is a great idea for keeping their monthly fees down. To really get a cost savings on unmanaged hosting, though, ditching a dedicated server and moving to a virtual private server (VPS) is an even better option.

Unmanaged VPS hosting is an extension of unmanaged hosting. Once again, the hosting provider will give you access to the server to host your site and make sure its stays online and is available to you. After that, you are on your own – responsible for maintenance, upgrades, backups and softwares. Technical support is probably limited only to power or server failure and internet outages.

The difference is that there is no physical hardware (or a dedicated server). Instead, your server is virtualized – meaning your hosting provider has divided one server into several smaller virtual servers, each with their own chunk of RAM and hard drive space. Because your provider is able to scale their server availability, space and power, extra savings per month can be passed on to you, the customer, when compared to a dedicated solution.

In conclusion:

• Unmanaged hosting is great for businesses and tech pros that know how to manage their own servers.
• Unmanaged hosting provides benefits like personal controls, customizations, and no sharing of resources when compared to managed hosting
• Unmanaged VPS hosting services can help you further reduce costs compared to a dedicated server