Managed Hosting: The Hidden Hack to Outsourcing for Agency Owners
When a client’s website is slow or down, they want answers yesterday, and any agency owner will tell you, that means an all-nighter of back and forth calls with the hosting company trying to get it figured out.
To top things off, most hosting companies use a support ticket escalation process that requires you to make your way through a tangled web of people. The worst part? Even after hours spent on the phone, they may not be able to answer your questions.
You need to NOT be the person on those calls. You need a specialist who understands the technical infrastructure behind an ecommerce website and you need them to be able to pick up the phone and figure things out for you.
The Problem With Conventional Hosting Support
The amazing thing about Hostdedi is most of our employees have their own websites, so we’ve definitely been where you are. We’ve dealt with bad support. We KNOW what that is. You could say it’s our bread and butter – we decided we were NEVER going to be like the other guys and hire people who didn’t understand what they were troubleshooting.
Most hosting support employees are great people, but have a really limited understanding of the infrastructure required to support robust ecommerce applications.
While you’re spending hours on the phone, working your way from junior level support to more senior operatives, your hosting company could very well turn around and tell you they don’t even KNOW the solution to your issue, and to take it up with the WordPress, WooCommerce, or Magento support team.
This is where a lot of people wind up frustrated.
Somewhere between hosting and ecommerce applications lies a gray area that a lot of support teams aren’t qualified to touch. There’s a gap here, and it’s in that gap that a lot of support requests go unresolved.
Sysops Engineers – Brilliant. Coveted. Expensive.
As small agencies grow into larger ones, they typically have less time to focus on the technical infrastructure running the back ends of their client’s websites. In pursuit of the ever-elusive work-life balance, they typically try to hire what’s known as a sysops engineer.
Sysops engineers are specialists who manage applications and systems. Their focus is on maintaining and enhancing the technical infrastructure that’s needed to keep things running smoothly, such as plugin and PHP updates.
The problem with that is, for a small and growing agency, sysops engineers can be cost-prohibitive to hire – to the tune of at least $90,000 a year.
On top of that, they can be tough to find. Sysops engineers who specialize in ecommerce applications have a specific set of knowledge and finding ones that are qualified to service your clients can be tough.
As an example, there are only 100 Magento masters in the entire world – and one of them is on the Hostdedi support team.
How to Save Time On Support Requests
So let’s back up for a second.
If you’re not in a position to hire an ecommerce-specialized sysops engineer, then what are your options exactly?
To start, let’s look at what a sysops engineer can potentially take off your plate:
- PHP and plugin updates
- Back-end optimization
- After-hours support requests
- Staging websites
- Website deployments
Let’s look at the available solutions:
| Do It Yourself | Hire a Sysops Engineer | Work with Hostdedi |
| Lose time fixing bugs and plugin issues | Save time, just oversee and train new hire | We’ll handle all support requests, start to finish, FOR you |
| Costs valuable hours | Costs $90,000+/year | Included w/ all hosting plans |
| Know all applications front to back yourself | Find someone who specializes in each application individually | Work with a team of experts who specializes in ecommerce applications |
What Are Managed Applications?
Hostdedi does hosting a little differently. When we started this company, we decided we wanted to supply more than just the technical infrastructure for a website – we wanted to provide unparalleled support and hosting environments that were optimized specifically for one thing: digital commerce applications.
Online stores. Marketplaces. Digital courses. Membership sites.
We wanted to provide hosting that did more than just house a website. We wanted to provide hosting that optimized it.
When you’re talking about this level of customization, standard support won’t cut it.
Enter managed applications hosting.
Built into the technology and what we do every single day here at Hostdedi is an administrative batch of services that covers all of the mundane technical aspects of hosting a website FOR you.
Managed applications are exactly that – your favorite ecommerce applications, managed by a team of experts, on Hostdedi servers programmed with brilliant hosting environments that make your websites SING.
Hostdedi Saves Agencies Thousands of Hours
When we talk to our agency partners about why their clients use us, we generally hear two things:
- We can be trusted to optimize and set up a hosting environment for an ecommerce site RIDICULOUSLY well and
- We have incredible, hands-on support that saves agencies and developers tons of time and money.
When Hostdedi takes on a client, we’re not just setting you up with an auto billing subscription, we’re managing your application FOR you. We’re like a sysops engineer and a web admin all rolled into one, with 24/7/365 support that’s always here for you.
Our team of experts live and breathe the digital commerce applications you work on every day – isn’t it time you took something off your plate?
