Many businesses will find that leasing a computing platform is more cost effective than buying one, especially with the current constraints on capital spending. In light of this it is good news that, as reported in Quocirca's free report Managed Hosting in Europe, there is an ever-increasing choice of managed hosting providers (MHP) in Europe.

MHPs pre-configure hardware, networks, storage and infrastructure software for customers to run all types of business applications, from email to ERP. MHPs take on responsibility for keeping the platform up to date and will commit to higher service-level agreements than internal IT departments. Furthermore, hosted platforms are an ideal way to house applications that need to be shared among multiple organisations; this includes those of independent software vendors (ISV) as they join the rush to software as a service (SaaS) as an alternative way of delivering their products.

In the past hardware servers have been provided on dedicated basis for each customer, but now, MHPs are turning en masse to shared hardware infrastructure as they compete with emerging cloud platforms from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, salesforce.com and others.

There are offerings for business of all sizes. At the enterprise end there are the big systems integrators that include managed hosting as part of a broader service offering. For small businesses there are communications providers that provide it as an add-on to network access services. Spanning the whole market are specialist MHPs whose raison d'être is the provision of enterprise-class compute platforms to all. These include NTT Europe Online, Rackspace Hosting, Savvis, Attenda, 7global and a host of other emerging vendors.

Quocirca hopes IT-Analysis readers will find the report a useful reference and also invites feedback via managed_hosting@quocirca.com for a second version of the report that will address any errors or omissions.