Managed Hosting Without the Data Center Overhead
Managed hosting puts your applications on provider-operated infrastructure with the operating system, patching, monitoring, and backup handled under SLA — the middle path between colocation you staff yourself and public cloud you have to re-architect for.
What RLM Delivers on Managed Hosting
Managed hosting is the least fashionable and most frequently correct answer for stable, predictable workloads. The decision that matters is not whether to use it, but which portions of the stack the provider actually owns — and what happens at 2am when something breaks.
How We Approach Managed Hosting
A structured advisory process tailored to cloud & managed services — from discovery through vendor selection and implementation support.
Workload & Ownership Assessment
We inventory the applications you are considering moving, their performance and availability requirements, and the operational tasks your team currently performs — establishing exactly which responsibilities you intend to transfer and which you will keep.
Provider Evaluation
We evaluate managed hosting providers — Rackspace, LightEdge, 365 Data Centers, Involta, and regional operators — against your requirements for compliance scope, support model, hardware refresh policy, and the true boundary of their managed responsibility.
SLA & Contract Negotiation
We negotiate the terms that actually determine your experience: response versus resolution times, escalation paths, credit structures that mean something, hardware refresh cadence, and the exit provisions that keep the renewal honest.
Migration & Runbook Handover
We plan the migration sequence, validate the provider runbooks against your actual failure modes, and confirm that monitoring, backup verification, and escalation work before you depend on them in production.
Managed Hosting Evaluation Criteria
The dimensions that consistently separate a deployment that pays for itself from one that quietly becomes shelfware.
Managed Boundary Clarity
The single largest source of managed hosting disputes is ambiguity about where the provider stops. Get the responsibility split documented at the layer level — hardware, hypervisor, OS, middleware, application — before signing.
Patching & Maintenance Windows
Ask who decides when patches apply, how much notice you get, and whether you can defer. A provider that patches on their schedule regardless of your release calendar will cause outages you did not plan for.
Backup Verification, Not Backup Existence
Every provider backs up. Far fewer test restores. Require documented, periodic restore testing with evidence — the backup you have never restored is a hypothesis, not a recovery plan.
Compliance Inheritance
If you need HIPAA, PCI, or SOC 2, confirm exactly which controls you inherit from the provider and which remain yours. Inherited compliance is real but partial, and the gap is always yours to close.
Hardware Refresh & Performance Drift
Multi-year hosting contracts on fixed hardware degrade in relative performance. Establish the refresh cadence and who pays for it, or plan to renegotiate at the midpoint.
Exit Cost & Data Egress
Model the cost and elapsed time of leaving before you arrive. Data volume, image portability, and contractual notice periods determine whether your renewal is a negotiation or a formality.
"The SLA we would have signed had 24-hour response and no resolution commitment. RLM caught it, renegotiated it, and the difference showed up the first time we had a real incident."
Independent means we will tell you when the answer is to keep what you have.
Where This Matters Most
Sector-specific considerations we see repeatedly in cloud and managed services engagements.
A Sample of the Cloud & Managed Services Providers We Evaluate
RLM is vendor neutral. These are among 600+ providers in our evaluation set — inclusion here is not an endorsement, and we are paid by the provider you choose, not by any provider in particular. How that works →
Where Do You Want to Start With Managed Hosting?
Start with a no-cost conversation with an RLM advisor — vendor neutral, no agenda, just clarity on the right path forward for your environment.
Talk to a Cloud Advisor