Enterprise Hosting: A solution for the ever-changing digital world

Having your websites and apps run smoothly at all times is crucial to the success of your brand, and having something go wrong can be catastrophic. But getting bogged down in all of the things that go into setting up and managing them is time-consuming and complicated—especially if your tech team's capabilities are on the lighter side.

With an enterprise hosting solution, everything is handled for you. You get infrastructure, management, security, scaling, and more all rolled into one. You also benefit from guaranteed uptime and dedicated support. 

Fully managed enterprise web hosting is at the top of the ladder in managed hosting solutions. For companies with high traffic volumes, resource-intensive applications, and strict compliance requirements, enterprise hosting is critical to securing business continuity in the demanding, digital-first climate. 

In short: It’s a lot easier (and much more reassuring) to leave the complex stuff to an experienced expert provider. So, let’s take a closer look at enterprise hosting, its features, and how your business can benefit from a fully managed solution.

What is enterprise hosting, and how is it different from regular hosting?

Enterprise hosting is a managed service delivering online infrastructure to large-scale web-dependent businesses. 

Along with hosting cloud-based web applications and data servers in an isolated environment, enterprise hosting provides management capabilities such as configuration, maintenance, and backup. The best providers also offer security features, scalability, and high reliability. 

The main difference between enterprise hosting and regular hosting is the scale. Enterprise hosting is designed specifically for larger sites with more complex needs., Providers typically offer greater server resources, infrastructure, and security.  

There are a few types of enterprise-managed hosting solutions to choose from. 

Semi-managed hosting gives you the same access to an isolated server environment as those using fully managed solutions. However, the responsibility of things like maintenance, security, and backup still falls on your shoulders. 

Fully managed hosting solutions are just that—managed entirely by your hosting provider. Within this, there is dedicated server hosting and shared hosting.

Dedicated server hosting. As the name suggests, this is when your website or app has its very own server. 

Shared hosting. This is when one server and its resources (such as CPU and RAM) are shared between multiple business websites. 

Enterprise hosting delivers advanced features designed to sustain high-performing, resource-intensive facilities.

Large-scale data storage. Guaranteed uptime with access to 24/7 support. Managed enterprise hosting provides the features businesses need to deliver optimal performances and continuous availability at scale, powered even further by enterprise-grade security.

And this is all with the infrastructure management handled. Different levels of services of enterprise hosting are available, so you can take a more hands-on approach if you wish. But if you’re looking for a stress-free solution, fully managed hosting takes a lot of work off your plate.

Do you need enterprise hosting?

Any large-scale organization will need enterprise hosting to manage its app and web infrastructure. However, you might find that even your small or midsize business needs it too.

It’s not unusual for small or medium business websites to generate high traffic volumes. And sometimes, these high traffic volumes and resource demands can begin to challenge the provisions of shared hosting services. 

The last thing you want is for your website to buckle under the pressure of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales or miss out on increased web traffic and potential revenue over Christmas because your shared server can’t handle the load.

Regardless of your business’s size, if you have critical websites that require reliably fast load times and guaranteed availability, enterprise hosting is a very wise consideration. It will help you avoid latency, downtime, and the financial repercussions that these issues can cause.

You need enterprise grade hosting because your business is critical. Beyond performance, fully managed enterprise hosting services offer desirables that your business—big or small—can use to maximize operational efficiency and safety. This includes A-list security and recovery measures, fully-maintained hardware, continuous software upgrades and patching, and 24/7 customer service support.

Let’s discuss some of these features in a little more depth, but before we do... 

What level of management do you need for your hosting?

You need to answer this question to make an informed decision when it comes to choosing an enterprise hosting product and provider. As we touched on briefly earlier, different solutions offer different levels of management.

You need to be clear on what your needs are and decide how involved you want to be on the technical side of things. Whether you want to be more engaged with your hosting management or delegate all responsibilities to a provider—you need to make sure your chosen solution has what you need.

What features should you look for when selecting enterprise hosting?

Enterprise hosting solutions often come with a vast array of features, many of which go beyond hosting to provide value to other business areas. But as a rule, first-class enterprise hosting solutions should provide all of the essential features we’re going to discuss below.

So, when doing your research, these are the things to look out for.

Multi-framework. Future-proofing and flexibility are critical in the ever-evolving e-commerce climate. The right tools and technologies are vital for your site or application. It doesn’t matter if you’re a beginner looking for a simple solution that allows you to manage pages in a content management system or a full stack developer proficient in numerous coding languages. You need to ensure your web provider offers the right technologies for your needs.  Look for a polyglot solution that supports multiple different frameworks, from Django 4 to high-traffic Drupal hosting. 

Monoliths, microservices, stateless—it doesn’t matter. The best enterprise hosting services should accommodate every framework and architecture you need to succeed.

Auto-scaling. Adaptability is essential for any business, and the same should be true of your enterprise hosting provider. Trying to anticipate traffic surges is one thing, but what about unplanned spikes? An auto-scaling solution that reacts for you almost instantly, doubling the resources of your production environment any time your site requires them, is a priceless commodity.

Ensure your chosen solution is equipped to scale your website or application reliably at a moment’s notice. Whether it’s automatic or not, you need to ensure you go with a solution that will scale easily with your business and its needs.

Observability. It’s crucial to keep a close eye on your website or application from development to production. The most robust enterprise hosting solutions allow you to monitor, profile, and test yours even before it is released. 

Seek a provider that offers you the tools to ensure performance and efficiency from the very beginning. Then, in production, keep track of server-side response time and memory usage. Solid enterprise hosting providers will alert you when something goes wrong, or your code doesn’t behave as it should.

Security. With the cyber threat landscape evolving at the same pace as cybersecurity, continuously defending your network against malicious attacks is paramount. Enterprise hosting services put security first, mitigating the risk of destructive hacking attempts and data breaches. 

Enterprise solutions come armed with a plethora of security-first features designed to protect even the most complex enterprise architectures. Security features you should look for include SSL encryption, DDoS protection, firewalls, patching, access controls, and more.

Certifications and compliance. Is the enterprise hosting solution you’re considering compliant with SOC 2 Type 2? What about PCI? Does it meet location-specific or industry-specific data privacy requirements, such as GDPR and HIPAA?

This is something to look particularly closely at during your research. It’s critical for business continuity that you do everything you can to avoid the penalties of non-compliance.

Service-level agreements (SLAs). If you’re looking for an enterprise cloud hosting service, find one like Platform.sh where you can get a guaranteed uptime of 99.99%. 

Why? Because repeated instances of server downtime result in unhappy customers, delayed business operations, SEO penalties, and lost sales. A guaranteed 99.99% uptime (less than 5 minutes of downtime per month) dramatically reduces downtime risks, increasing operational productivity and sales.

Make sure that you check for customer support availability, too. Enterprise providers should offer 24/7 customer support. High customer support availability means if issues do arise, they can be fixed quickly and discreetly.

Automated backups. Data loss can have severe reputational and financial repercussions, so you need a solution that provides continuous and automated remote backup services. This protects your critical financial, sales, inventory, and customer data from loss. 

High performance. You should host your website and web applications on high-performance hardware if you want to deliver fast, responsive customer experiences at scale. Look for a provider that is capable of handling high-volume traffic.

Fully managed solutions from Platform.sh

Platform.sh is a unified, polyglot, multi-cloud enterprise hosting platform. Designed for complex, high-traffic applications, we aim to infuse your business with the three essential elements that drive reputational and revenue prosperity.

Reliability, availability, and scalability. 

Supporting more than 100 frameworks and 14 programming languages, we empower you to build your applications with unrivaled flexibility. Devoted to Drupal? Enthusiastic about React? Faithful to Magento? Whatever your favorite frameworks are, you can deploy them in a single click and mix and match microservices to meet intricate, future-proof business goals.

Dedicated to performance, our untethered solution can guarantee industry-leading uptime and reliable 24/7 support across five continents. This is at no cost to speed, as our managed content delivery network (CDN) layer supports lightning-fast time to first byte.

When it comes to security, we’re compliant with European GDPR (DPA available), German BDSG (DPA available), Canadian PIPEDA, and the Australian Privacy Act. 

Platform.sh has undergone an annual SOC 2 Type 2 examination over Security, Privacy and Availability, and achieved PCI DSS Level 1 compliance for our platform hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). 

We are also compliant with data privacy regulations across continents, from GDPR and BDSG to PIPEDA and the Australian Privacy Act. 

We boast auto-redundant architecture, regular security updates, strict access controls, and automated backups. You can place your trust in us to deliver enterprise-grade security. 

FAQs about enterprise hosting

What is fully managed enterprise hosting?

Fully managed enterprise hosting is the first-class solution for hosting services. It provides businesses with a wholly isolated hosting environment in which data servers are managed entirely by the hosting provider. 

Fully managed hosting services include security, maintenance, upgrades, and compliance monitoring. They’re also capable of multi-framework support, from popular enterprise WordPress hosting to other frameworks like Express.

Fully managed enterprise hosting also differs from semi-managed hosting. This is a solution in which server operations are only partially handled by the hosting provider.

What type of solution should I choose?

The hosting solution you choose will depend on everything from your business’s industry and size to your individual needs and goals.

A fully managed enterprise hosting solution will delegate almost all of the responsibility to your provider—taking the pressure off of you. But you can also choose to retain some level of involvement if you wish. 

Ultimately, no matter how involved you want to be, your priority should be reliability. Choose a provider that offers dependable availability, sturdy security,  and flexible scaling, and you won’t go far wrong.