<p style="text-align: justify;">When it’s time to troubleshoot critical, server-level issues, it’s good to have experts on the team. Having an expert can mean the difference between being down for a few hours or just a few minutes. Dedicated hosting from Rackspace provides several advantages over competitors, including a team of professionals is there for your servers at any time of the day.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Dedicated and Managed Dedicated Servers</strong></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Dedicated servers are a step up from shared hosting. Dedicated servers &#8220;dedicate&#8221; server memory, CPU cycles and hard drive space to one business, so the physical server shares no resources with other webmasters, including bandwidth. For webmasters who find that shared hosting is causing a bottleneck in performance, dedicated hosting is worth considering.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Managed dedicated servers are an even bigger step up. With standard dedicated servers, the webmaster must manage everything regarding server settings, website setup, performance tuning, monitoring downtime, security and backups. The only difference between an in-house server and a dedicated server in the cloud is the location of the server. There isn’t much difference in terms of maintenance and server monitoring.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">With managed dedicated servers, the webmaster is freed from all of these server maintenance tasks. Rackspace offers a dedicated team of specialists to watch the servers, perform maintenance, tune any performance issues, perform hardware upgrades and secure the server with proper firewall and antivirus software.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Rackspace’s Managed Team</strong></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">You can get managed hosting from several providers, but Rackspace has advantages and additional support not offered by other providers.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">First and most important, Rackspace’s team works directly with the onsite team as part of a collaborative effort to keep servers tuned and running smoothly. The business gets an account manager, lead technician, support technical, support specialist, and an account manager and business development consultant. For billing inquiries, the company can call its own billing specialist. All of these team members work with the business’ internal workforce to facilitate faster troubleshooting and server maintenance. The team works through day-to-day responsibilities<br />
to ensure the server has 100% uptime, and this percentage is guaranteed.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Rackspace also has a state-of-the-art data center. Data centers are a key part of traditional server hosting that’s beneficial to a many companies who don’t want to manage their IT themselves. Mature businesses need fast servers to process millions of page views each month. Server hosts, with fast data centers to process the information, allows for a business’ web application to be tuned for a fast user response.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The main reason for Rackspace managed dedicated servers is the guaranteed uptime, reduced overhead on internal IT teams, and the 1-hour replacement guarantee if any server hardware should fail. Serious businesses need high-maintenance support to guarantee no data loss and websites are online at all times. Most mature businesses lose thousands or more every hour when servers fail. With managed hosting, the business is able to focus on day-to-day tasks without daily server monitoring, maintenance and backups.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>Jennifer Marsh is a software developer, programmer and technology writer and occasionally blogs for managed hosting provider </em><em>Rackspace Hosting</em><em>.</em></p>

What Does “Managed” Dedicated Actually Mean?
