"Managed hosting" is one of those phrases that means something different to every vendor selling it. For some, it means "your WordPress site is on our shared server and we charge you $29/month." For others, it means "we have an on-call rotation, real monitoring, and a tested disaster-recovery runbook." The price difference is real; the value difference is larger.
Here is what we include in every Taylored Digital managed-hosting retainer, because we think it is what the term should mean:
- Infrastructure-as-code. Your entire environment is defined in AWS CDK. If the whole region catches fire, we can stand it up again in a different region in under an hour.
- Daily backups, tested. We take a backup every day. Once a month, we restore one to a scratch environment and verify the app still boots. Untested backups are theater.
- Security patches. OS, runtime, dependencies. When CVEs land, we patch within 72 hours for medium severity, 24 hours for high.
- Uptime monitoring. Synthetic checks hitting the home page every 5 minutes from multiple regions. When something breaks, we know before you do.
- Response SLA. We commit to a first-response time during business hours. After-hours incidents get best-effort, which in practice has meant "within an hour" in our experience.
- A monthly report. Every first-of-the-month, you get a one-page summary: uptime, incidents (if any), patches applied, what we noticed.
If any of that is missing from your current hosting arrangement, it is worth a conversation.