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Merkin
Shared Hoster
How complicated and involved is the work that a managed cloud host does? Managed hosts seem to charge double what the underlying unmanaged cloud host (e.g. Linode and Vultr) does for each plan.
Is this something that an advanced layperson can handle if there's decent enough instructions somewhere on the net, or is it a "if you have to ask then you should get managed hosting" sort of thing?
Comments
It depends what you are running… setting up software firewalls, changing SSH ports and generally monitor what’s going on. Also keeping software up to date.
If you look at VPs’s then pretty much all of the hardware is looked after for you.
You need no manage the security / software on the VPS and the day to day running.
Dedicated is another story and harder, you need to know what you are doing. Especially when it comes to hardware failures and issues. I would advise you to try the unmanaged cloud first as you can always use services like TrustPilot to manage your Cloud later if needed.
As your comparing plans, your sure to come across some VPS plans that advertise as cloud. There's a difference between VPS and cloud hosting. I'm looking at the latter for future scalability.
Nonetheless, the security & software and the day to day running applies to cloud hosting in a similar sense. Is this a complicated endeavour, or otherwise requires much attention? I'm not opposed to outsourcing the work if it'll save me a non-negligible amount of time.
There's a bit of overlap between VPS and Cloud. There is actually a formal definition of Cloud Computing (NIST Special Publication 800-145). Here's a form of it summed up:
1: On demand self-service - you can provision capabilities as needed without requiring human interaction
2: Broad Network access - capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms
3: Resource pooling - Resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model
4: Rapid elasticity - capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released to scale rapidly outward and inward with demand.
5: Measured service - resource usage can be monitored, controlled, reported and billed.
With this in mind, there are some VPS vendors that are a true cloud, and there are some that are not. You should be careful though and avoid buying too deeply into misleading vendor marketing - cloud isn't magic, it's just a tool we use at the infrastructure level to sell slices of machines on-demand by way of programmatic interfaces. hope that helps!