Every article here is written for the provider side of hosting: the MSP deciding where client workloads run and how the platform is operated. They are grouped by the order in which the decisions usually arrive. None of them names a supplier or quotes a price.
Start with your requirements
- Hosting requirements planner: for an MSP who wants a written starting profile (isolation model, headroom, recovery, network and provider questions) before talking to suppliers. Use it first, then read the articles it points to.
- Hosting requirements worksheet: for those who prefer to work through the same questions on paper, or who need a document to share with a colleague or a supplier.
Choose how tenants share the platform
- Multi-tenant isolation: read this when deciding between hypervisor, container and dedicated-hardware boundaries, or when a client asks how separate they really are. Includes noisy-neighbour controls and tests.
- Dedicated hosting for MSPs: read when a tenant seems to need whole machines, or when you are deciding whether to self-host your RMM, PSA and backup consoles and where those should sit.
- Virtual servers and capacity planning: read before buying capacity or when tenants complain of slowness at peak times. Walks through sizing from measured peaks, overcommit, storage write penalties and failure headroom.
- Private cloud and network design: read when designing or reviewing segmentation, addressing and out-of-band management, especially if clients bring overlapping address ranges.
Operate it and make it pay
- Backup and recovery: read when you promise a client that hosted workloads are recoverable. Covers recovery tiers, independent and immutable copies, per-tenant separation and restore rehearsal.
- Hosting economics: read when pricing the hosting line or when a tenant seems unprofitable. Gives the structure of a cost and margin model using formulas and arbitrary units rather than prices.
Buy and move
- Evaluating a hosting provider: read before signing with a supplier, or at renewal. A question worksheet, how to read SLAs and assurance reports, and the exit terms that matter.
- Migration and tenant onboarding: read when moving a client estate onto your platform. Covers discovery, waves, data movement, a cutover runbook and rollback.
How to use these together
A sensible order for a new platform or a new supplier is: planner, isolation, capacity, network, backup, economics, supplier evaluation, then migration. If you already run a platform, start from the area where you are seeing symptoms: slowness points to capacity and isolation, a worrying audit question to isolation and backup, a margin problem to economics.