Managed hosting
Managed hosting is an operational model in which a hosting provider takes responsibility for running and maintaining infrastructure on the customer’s behalf. The provider handles the day-to-day work of keeping the system running: system administration and maintenance, patching, monitoring, security hardening, backup and recovery, and scaling. The customer supplies the application and its data, and consumes the running service rather than operating the platform underneath it.
Managed hosting is best understood as an operational dimension that cuts across the cloud computing service models, rather than as a layer in its own right. Platform as a Service (PaaS) and serverless computing are inherently managed: the provider runs the platform and the customer deploys only code. Cloud service providers also offer managed forms of lower-layer services, such as managed databases and managed Kubernetes clusters, where the customer still shapes the resource but is relieved of the control-plane upkeep. At the other end, unmanaged hosting rents raw compute, storage, and network, and leaves every layer above that to the customer.
Managed hosting services are offered by both cloud service providers and traditional hosting providers. A cloud-based example is Cloud Run, a Google Cloud Platform service that runs containerized applications without exposing the underlying cluster. Managed Kubernetes services such as Amazon EKS, Google GKE, and Azure AKS give the same treatment to container orchestration. Traditional providers, meanwhile, have long offered managed servers and managed private clouds for workloads not suited to the public cloud.
Because the provider is responsible for keeping the service up, managed hosting is typically sold with a service level agreement (SLA) that commits to a target uptime and defines remedies when it is missed. This shifts operational risk from the customer to the provider, and is a large part of what the customer is paying for.
The trade-off is control. Managed services are opinionated about configuration, patch cadence, and feature support, and moving between providers can be costly once an application is built around a particular managed API. They also command a price premium over equivalent self-managed resources. For businesses that want to leverage advanced technology without the complexity of running it themselves, though, managed hosting lets them treat infrastructure as a service and focus on their core product.