There was a time when managed hosting meant little more than renting out servers in a remote data center. In its most basic form, collocation, the vendor provided nothing more than power, cooling and physical cable connections. Although collocation is still a viable service and business model, managed hosting has evolved far beyond its humble beginnings. In its most sophisticated form, complex managed hosting, companies can outsource high-level IT functions such as OS management, virtualization, load balancing, performance monitoring (CPU, network and memory utilization), security and more.

However, some vendors that claim to be in the complex hosting market can provide only a small subset of these functions. As result of the disparities in technical know-how and experience, there is currently some confusion in the market as to exactly what complex managed hosting means, and what customers can and should expect from a potential vendor.

Read this market survey to get a comparison of the different features offered by complex managed hosting companies.