Fully managed web hosting provides organisations with a reliable, scalable, and secure platform where every aspect of their website hosting, from server maintenance and performance optimisation to backups, security, and deployment, is handled by a dedicated team.
For businesses, public sector agencies, and nonprofits that need more than just basic hosting, fully managed web hosting ensures peace of mind, high availability, and expert support, without requiring in-house infrastructure or expertise.
Managed vs Unmanaged Web Hosting
Choosing the right hosting solution starts with understanding the difference between managed and unmanaged hosting.
What is Unmanaged Web Hosting?
Unmanaged hosting(external link) provides the bare essentials: a server environment and basic support. You're responsible for:
- Installing software
- Managing security patches
- Performing updates
- Monitoring performance
- Handling incidents and downtime
This approach is best suited to internal teams with the time and technical expertise to handle hosting operations.
What is Managed Web Hosting?
Managed hosting(external link) hands off these responsibilities to your hosting provider. It includes:
- Ongoing system maintenance
- Monitoring and security management
- Performance optimisation
- Automated backups and updates
- Technical support and incident response
Fully managed web hosting goes a step further - offering proactive monitoring, integrated deployment tools, compliance support, and bespoke infrastructure tuning.
Which Option Should You Choose?
For organisations with critical services, compliance obligations, or limited internal technical capacity, fully managed web hosting is the clear choice.
While unmanaged hosting may appear cost-effective upfront, the long-term overhead in risk, resource use, and support often outweighs the benefits.
Benefits of Fully Managed Web Hosting
At Somar Digital, we’ve developed Somar Digital Cloud - a fully managed web hosting solution tailored to the needs of public-facing organisations.
Here’s what sets it apart.
High Availability
Built on Amazon Web Services (AWS)(external link), Somar Digital Cloud features built-in auto-scaling across all hosting plans. Whether you're experiencing a gradual rise in traffic or a sudden surge, your website remains stable and responsive.
Our infrastructure is designed to handle sustained load increases and peak-time spikes — with capacity on demand whenever it’s needed.
Safe, Secure, and Compliant
Security is non-negotiable. Somar Digital Cloud leverages more than 100 security and compliance guardrails provided by AWS, covering everything from data encryption to intrusion detection.
Our 24/7 on-call team is automatically alerted to incidents, supported by real-time monitoring and compliance tools. If your organisation has specific data sovereignty or security requirements, we can help configure your hosting environment to meet them.
Optimised for Silverstripe, Extensible to Your Needs
While Somar Digital Cloud is optimised for Silverstripe CMS, it’s also built on a flexible modern cloud platform. Need to integrate machine learning, leverage serverless functions, or build out a data lake? No problem.
Our platform supports the full suite of AWS services, allowing us to tailor infrastructure to your organisation’s specific needs - whether that’s high-speed content delivery, real-time data processing, or scalable APIs.
24/7 Monitoring and Response
We maintain around-the-clock monitoring of all hosted environments. This includes:
- Application and server health checks
- Log management
- Incident alerts and escalation protocols
If an issue arises, our on-call team is notified immediately, ensuring rapid response and resolution.
Sustainable Cloud Infrastructure
Somar Digital Cloud also supports your sustainability goals. Our platform tracks, measures, and forecasts the carbon emissions associated with your hosting usage.
You can estimate the emissions saved compared to an on-premises data centre and use these insights in your organisational reporting or climate commitments.
Built-In Deployments
With continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) built in, there’s no need for manual server access or risky deployments.
Our platform supports zero-downtime deployments across all environments. This reduces human error, increases deployment frequency, and allows your development teams to focus on delivering value.
Somar Digital Cloud: A Solution for Fully Managed Web Hosting
About Somar Digital Cloud
Somar Digital Cloud is our fully managed web hosting platform, built on AWS in the Sydney region to provide fault-tolerant, scalable, and secure infrastructure. Every environment is actively supported by our in-house operations team, with robust technical processes in place for performance, monitoring, and compliance.
Somar Digital is an AWS Select Consulting Partner and an AWS Public Sector Partner(external link), reflecting our proven capability to deliver secure, high-performance cloud solutions for government, nonprofits, and enterprise clients.
Our partner status also demonstrates our commitment to ongoing technical excellence, including training, certification, and customer satisfaction standards required by the AWS Partner Network.
About AWS: A Scalable and Secure Foundation
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services across global data centres.
AWS provides the underlying infrastructure for Somar Digital Cloud - trusted by startups, enterprises, and government agencies worldwide to lower costs, innovate faster, and scale without compromise.
Somar Digital Cloud trusted by
Hosting Plans and Support Levels
Somar Digital offers flexible support plans to suit organisations of varying size, complexity, and risk profiles - from small public-facing sites to mission-critical digital platforms.
Plans can be tailored based on:
- Recommended monthly pageviews
- Infrastructure redundancy
- Autoscaling thresholds
- Monitoring frequency
- Support response and resolution times
- Incident notifications and post-incident reporting
- Environments (dev, staging, production)
- Support channels (email, phone, Slack)
- Monthly investment (12 or 24-month agreements)
Whether you're looking for standard uptime and maintenance, or a high-availability solution with rapid incident response, our support levels are designed to scale with your organisation’s needs.
