Having your websites and apps run smoothly at all times is crucial for business success, and having something go wrong can be catastrophic to your business. This success or failure rests on setting up and managing hosting, which is a complex and time-consuming process, especially if your tech team needs more experience.
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 app hosting is at the top of the ladder in managed hosting solutions. For companies with high traffic volume, 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 organizations that depend on the web.
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. Enterprise providers typically offer greater server resources, infrastructure, and security.
There are a few types of enterprise-managed hosting based on how much management you want to handle yourself:
1. Management Level Options
- Semi-managed hosting gives you access to dedicated server resources, but you're responsible for maintenance, security updates, and backups. This works well if you have technical staff who want control over the server environment.
- Fully managed hosting means your provider handles all server management, security, maintenance, and backups. You focus on your business while they handle the technical work.
2. Infrastructure Options
- Dedicated servers, as the name suggests, your website or app has its own server( physical or virtual) that isn't shared with anyone else.
- Shared hosting means multiple websites share the same server resources (CPU, memory, storage). While more affordable, this can limit performance during traffic spikes.
- Cloud-based hosting uses virtualized resources across multiple servers and data centers. This provides flexibility, automatic failover, and the ability to scale resources up or down as needed.
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 small or midsize businesses need it too.
It’s not unusual for small or medium-sized business websites to generate high volumes of traffic. 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 crash 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 size, if your website requires reliably fast load times and guaranteed availability, enterprise hosting is a very smart choice. It will help you avoid latency, downtime, and the financial repercussions that these issues can cause.
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.
Key features to look for in enterprise hosting
Enterprise hosting solutions often come with an array of features, many of which go beyond simply hosting to provide value to other business areas. As a rule, when choosing enterprise hosting, these are the features to look out for:
Multi-framework Support
Choose a solution that supports multiple programming languages and frameworks. This keeps your application future-proof without locking you into one single stack. 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. Look for a polyglot solution that supports multiple 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.
Scalability
Your enterprise hosting should grow with your business, handling traffic spikes and increased demand with minimal downtime or performance issues. Many providers offer automatic scaling, but this can lead to surprise bills when resources spin up unexpectedly during traffic surges or attacks.
Ensure your enterprise hosting gives you control over scaling decisions, with transparent pricing so you know costs upfront. The best solutions provide real-time monitoring to help you understand when scaling is actually needed.
Real-time Monitoring
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.
Choose 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)
Enterprise hosting providers should offer uptime guarantees that promise your website will stay online for a specific percentage of time each month. A good uptime guarantee is 99.9%, which means your site can only be down for a few minutes per month.
Also, ensure that you check for customer support availability. Enterprise providers should offer 24/7 customer support. High customer support availability means that 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.
Upsun's enterprise hosting solution
Upsun is a unified, polyglot, multi-cloud enterprise hosting platform. Designed for complex, high-traffic applications, we aim to infuse your business with essential elements that drive reputational and revenue prosperity. Here's how Upsun delivers on each essential enterprise hosting feature:
Multi-framework Support
Upsun supports 10 programming languages and 18 services, giving you flexibility to build applications your way. Whether devoted to Drupal? Enthusiastic about React? Faithful to Magento? Whatever your favorite frameworks are, you can mix and match microservices to meet intricate, future-proof business goals.
Scalability
You can combine vertical and horizontal scaling to optimize your system's performance, especially during high-demand periods. Adjust CPU, RAM, and instance counts through our CLI web console or API based on your specific traffic patterns and application demands. This granular control lets you match your application resources with real-time traffic patterns while maintaining cost predictability.
Our auto-scaling solution, Scalsun, is currently in beta, providing an opportunity for early adopters to shape its capabilities. As we refine this tool, you can also leverage our real-time metrics APIs to build tailored custom scaling solutions. This allows them to build custom scaling solutions tailored to your unique needs. Our support team works directly with you to help implement and optimize your scaling strategy.
Real-time Monitoring
Maintaining high uptime is essential for a positive user experience. Upsun contributes to application availability through robust, real-time monitoring of infrastructure health, including CPU, memory, and disk usage, to proactively address potential issues. We leverage a global network across multiple cloud providers (AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud) to deliver performance worldwide.
For optimal global content delivery, you can integrate Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to make your apps even snappier and more accessible to users around the globe.
Security and Compliance
Upsun delivers enterprise-grade security with built-in features, SSL encryption, DDoS protection, firewalls, automatic security patching, and granular access controls. Beyond these protective measures, Upsun meets strict industry compliance standards. The platform has passed annual SOC 2 Type 2 for Security, Privacy, and Availability, and achieved PCI DSS Level 1 compliance across all supported cloud providers—Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This means your business can trust that both security and regulatory requirements are handled at the platform level.
Service-level Agreements
Upsun guarantees 99.99% uptime (less than 5 minutes of downtime per month) with 24/7 support across five continents. This high availability reduces business risks and ensures issues are resolved quickly when they arise.
Reliability
Upsun ensures consistency across development, staging, and production environments through exact replicas using cluster cloning and immutable deployments. Each application component runs separately, preventing individual issues from affecting the whole system.
That’s not all
Beyond the Basics
What separates good hosting from great hosting? The tools that empower your development team to that accelerate their workflow and work efficiently. Beyond our core enterprise features, Upsun offers features that modern development teams need:
Git-driven deployments: Every deployment is triggered by Git commits, making the process predictable and trackable.
Instant preview environments: Create perfect copies of your production environment instantly, complete with real data and configurations.
Usage-based pricing: Pay only for the resources you use, with transparent pricing that scales with your needs.
Multi-app support: Deploy multiple applications and services in a single project, perfect for microservice architectures.
Take the next step
Enterprise hosting isn't just about better servers—it's about freeing your team to focus on what matters most: building great products and serving customers. When your hosting provider handles security, scaling, maintenance, and compliance, you eliminate the technical barriers that slow down growth.
The best enterprise hosting solutions adapt to your technology choices, whether that's WordPress, Express, or any framework your team prefers. What matters most is choosing a platform that delivers consistent performance, bulletproof security, and effortless scaling.
Experience the Upsun difference with a free trial. See how modern enterprise hosting can accelerate your development workflow and give you confidence in your infrastructure.
Your greatest work
is just on the horizon
