Agencies: How to Choose a Managed Hosting Partner
Creative, marketing, and web development agencies increasingly rely on managed hosting providers, and the reason is simple. Managed hosting takes some of the technical load off of operating websites and servers. And that allows for more focus on clients, with less on the technical stuff.
The best hosting provider matches up with your clients’ needs. So let’s start at square one, and explore how to make that assessment with any managed hosting provider. (Think of it as a web-host chem check.)
How Does a Specific Hosting Solution Match up with Your Needs?
Your clients’ projects come in unique shapes and sizes. You can assess how well a web-hosting solution fits those needs by considering four key qualities: scalability, flexibility, ease-of-use, and power.
- Scalability lets your clients’ sites fluctuate with demand, ensuring swift access even if visitors and page requests spike. If your client expects their site traffic to grow exponentially, you’ll definitely want to look for scalable solutions.
- Flexibility frees you to build a website or online application the way you want. You can base your hosting choice on the specific capabilities and additional services you need. Less flexible solutions specialize in doing fewer things really well, while more flexible services provide a greater range of coding options.
- Ease of use decreases the need for technical expertise, allowing non-technical clients or design-centric teams to get the most out of the hosting without outside help.
- Power means that the server hardware can better handle significant loads and complex tasks. While small business-profile sites can manage fine with less power, online properties like ecommerce or media-rich blogs gain a lot from having more.
As you’re reviewing client needs and assessing your own team’s skills, you can choose the right combination of these four areas and find a sensible price point that works for everyone.
How Much Can You Rely on Technical Support and Customer Service?
Running an agency is already challenging, and you don’t want to add extra burden through slow or unresponsive engineering support or lackluster customer service. The high level of support and service you receive is really the biggest value in a managed hosting provider. Ideally, you want a managed hosting provider that offers:
- Friendly, expert engineers, technicians, and customer service that understand your needs
- Multiple contact methods
- Around-the-clock advice and problem resolution every day of the year
- An extensive self-help knowledge base so you can more easily make adjustments yourself
- Timely and informative updates on any service interruptions
How Well Can the Provider Handle a Range of Clients and Projects?
Your client projects vary widely, from small businesses with simple profile sites, to customers who need complex interactive environments. Rather than satisfying those needs across numerous providers, it can be easier to centralize with a single, trusted provider.
The extra familiarity with policies, billing, and even support representatives goes a long way. But that’s only possible when the provider has all the bases covered. Here’s what our roster of hosting solutions looks like at Media Temple, which is a good example of a wide range that can support most clients’ needs:
- Managed Services for Amazon Web Services (AWS) for high scalability, flexibility, and power
- Self-managed Virtual Private Servers (VPS) for a strong, flexible, customizable development environment
- Managed VPS for that same server power, with a lower bar of technical know-how
- Shared Hosting for inexpensive hosting that’s easy-to-use, while still offering the flexibility to build sites with most popular methods
- Managed WordPress hosting streamlines the shared hosting experience down to WordPress, making it as easy to get a site up as possible
Why Choose Media Temple as Your Managed Hosting Partner?
The range and type of hosting, combined with the right customer support and price, are all vital aspects of choosing the perfect provider for your agency – and are all hallmarks of what we do at Media Temple. But we also believe in going a little further, and you ‘ll find even more advantages as part of our Agency Partner Program:
- Discounts – When you handle the billing for your client’s hosting, we’ll give you 20% off your hosting prices.
- Referral credits – When you refer a client to us for hosting, we’ll give you a 20% credit based on the hosting they choose.
- Single sign-on – Access all of your hosting information and technology from one login.
- Partner badges – Show your clients you’re connected with an elite hosting provider.
Depending on the number of hosting subscriptions you have with us, you can also access additional benefits like priority support, access to events, free portfolio hosting, and access to a customer success manager.
Learn more about how Media Temple can help your agency get the support you need.
