Dedicated Hosting is Dead

I was looking over the reviews we will be placing online soon and I have been noticing an interesting trend. Although trend is not really the word for it… I suppose standard is best. What is interesting about this new standard is that it was the biggest difference between Dedicated and Managed.

(WebHost Blog) For years, Dedicated Hosting meant you lease a box in a datacenter and you deal with it. After the initial software install, you had to handle the administration of it; from software to the kernel it was your problem. The only thing the host really had to do was hardware support. Your hard drive crashed? Alright we will replace it, be about 20 mins.

And then someone said well let’s look at this logically. We could just take out the old drive and put a new one in and say alright customer its all you, but that might not be good service wise. We could offer to reinstall the software on there (this was about 10+ years ago). So we had hardware replacement and basic software recovery.

Then they thought well data backups is quite a good thing to have. We could expect our customers to backup data on their own but what if they don’t? If their hard drive crashes we will get blamed so howabout we add backup as an add-on. Then if the drive crashes we can rebuild it using the backup. In order to be more competitive maybe we should even make it standard.

By now you can imagine where I am going with this. Hardware replacement begot software reinstalls, which begot OS and hardware restarts and data backup which begot add-on service features which begot standard features and then we get to the meat of it. Support. Technical support for more than just the hardware. Some places offer it a la carte like FastServers and some include support like Superb Internet’s dedicated hosing.

And like that we now have managed hosting. I am pretty sure the name Dedicated Hosting will be around for a while, its a good name (you have a dedicated box for you and only you), but the dedicated hosting of today is not the dedicated hosting of a decade ago, by any stretch of the imagination. As more dedicated hosts add technical support to their solutions such that instead of a la carte, or having a limited amount of troubleshooting calls they have well dedicated support staff, then dedicated and managed will merge. For all practical purposes they already have.

About David Dunlap
Over the past ten years David has been a prolific author of hundreds of blogs, commentaries and reviews found here on WebHostBlog.com , as well as WebHostMagazine.com and other sites around the Internet. David manages the daily operations at both WebHostBlog and Web Host Magazine & Buyer's Guide, and as the head editor, David uses his unique analytical skills to ensure that both sites maintain their integrity and tough, but fair minded, reputations. Prior to his active career analyzing the Web Host industry, David specialized in networking and communications for the U.S. government. David's expertise in traditional marketing and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has helped boost companies both inside and outside of the Web Host industry.