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Los Angeles-based Web hosting and cloud services provider Media Temple has rolled out a new managed service for customers that use Amazon Web Services (AWS). Designed for enterprises with complex and fast-evolving cloud hosting needs, Media Temple's managed offering targets users who want to migrate Web sites or apps to AWS for the first time, as well as existing AWS customers looking for more support.

Media Temple, which was acquired by GoDaddy in 2013, said it developed the new service to meet the needs of customers who could benefit from AWS' cloud solutions but lacked the time or expertise to deploy them effectively. It built its new offering after conducting pilot tests with a few customers earlier this year.

The company decided to partner with AWS rather than develop its own cloud-based managed hosting service to focus on services "that would deliver the most value to customers," noted Brendan Fortune, Media Temple's Product Director for Cloud Solutions. Fortune said it was a no-brainer for the company to focus on providing premium managed cloud hosting services and step in as its customers' cloud architects and sysadmins.

$199/Month and Up, Not Counting AWS Fees

Working as an advanced technology partner of AWS, Media Temple is aiming its new managed services at customers looking for "highly available, pay-as-you-go infrastructure for large-scale projects," Fortune said.

The CloudTech managed services are available in four different plans: Essential (starting at $199 per month), Advanced ($399 per month), Premium ($799 per month) and Executive ($1,599 per month). These plans do not include the costs for AWS services, but come with 24/7 on-call support from certified systems administrators, round-the-clock proactive monitoring, security scanning and malware removal.

The Advanced and higher plans also provide support from a dedicated account management team. All of these plans offer a range of options for automated backups, performance tuning, site migration, security audits and more.

Expert Cloud Help in 'Short Supply'

We contacted Fortune to learn more about the changes Media Temple is seeing in the cloud environment. "Demand for cloud managed services [is] really growing across the board," he told us. "Startups and enterprises alike have understood the value of the cloud, but need expert help to get the most out of it. And expert help like this is in short supply."

Fortune added that Media Temple's new managed services "cater to the business needs of creative agencies, Web developers, content providers, e-commerce, SaaS and enterprise businesses." Among the customers the company worked with in the pilot phase of its managed cloud services were Epicure Digital and Karma Labs.

Epicure Digital, which creates and delivers multimedia menus for restaurant customers, was quickly outgrowing its single-server platform, supported by just one developer. By shifting the company's architecture to AWS with the help of some new software development, Media Temple said it was able to deliver a high-availability solution while reducing Epicure's costs by 36 percent.

Karma, which aggregates data from social media and e-commerce platforms to provide trust-based scoring for online reviews, was able to build a new autoscaling infrastructure with Media Temple's help to scale its services more quickly and easily.

"It's not just about understanding what services the cloud offers (and AWS in particular) and how to use them, but having real experience building complex applications out in the cloud," Fortune told us. "Additionally, if you don't have any cloud expertise, it is quite expensive to source repeatable sysops-like services, either internally or externally."

Source: Media Temple Launches Managed Cloud Hosting Services for AWS