Managed Hosting Providers enable organizations like SaaS Providers and Mobility Service Providers to eliminate the huge costs required to setup and run a data center. In addition to providing a more cost-effective alternative to maintaining their own IT infrastructure, many Managed Hosting Providers provide organizations with guarantee Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and 100% uptime. This ensures their customer's online sales and satisfaction aren't impacted due to performance or downtime.

Delivering on high SLA commitments for thousands of customers requires Managed Hosting providers to overcome a number of database challenges including high availability, scalability and hiring highly skilled support staff. Leading Managed Hosting providers are using the tools and services provided by MySQL Enterprise Edition to improve application performance and availability, and deliver on the promise of guaranteed uptime.

Some of the major challenges that Managed Hosting providers face are:

• High Availability - Managed Hosting Providers have to deliver on their Zero Downtime and 100% SLA commitments by providing a highly available infrastructure that can be recovered in case of a hardware failure, network failure, application failure or natural disaster.
• Scalability - Online applications frequently experience surges in traffic due to their rapid growth, seasonal business or special events. Managed Hosting providers must be able to deliver a database infrastructure that scales exponentially, on-demand.
• Experts on Staff - Managed Hosting Providers need to maintain a very highly qualified technical staff to deliver all the required services, such as application monitoring, high availability infrastructures and backup & recovery best practices, to fulfill their customers SLAs.
• Responsive Support - Managed Hosting providers must have the training, skills and expertise to quickly resolve a wide range of challenges that impact their customers applications.

MySQL is a key component of the proven open source LAMP ( Linux, Apache, MySQL Perl/PHP/Python) stack, enabling Managed Hosting Providers to deliver services to small & medium sized business, web properties and large enterprises that are rapidly adopting LAMP for their business-critical applications MySQL Enterprise Edition helps Managed Hosting providers fulfill their SLA commitments and operate more efficiently by providing the following benefits:

• Deliver High Availability with the MySQL Enterprise Monitor - The MySQL Enterprise Monitor and the MySQL Enterprise Advisors give providers the tools to better manage their High Availability architectures. For example, the new Replication Monitor provides real-time database status and health information to proactively help system administrators identify and correct replication related problems before they become costly outages.
• Improve Reliability using MySQL Enterprise Advisors - Tools like the MySQL Enterprise Monitor and Advisors enable Managed Service Providers to efficiently manage multiple highly available MySQL database deployments. 100+ security, performance and replication specific rules notify network engineers to critical events that can impact a MySQL application and advises them on how to fix them.
• Easily Scale-out with the MySQL Enterprise Replication Monitor - MySQL is enabling some of the most highly trafficked web sites in the world like Yahoo!, Craigslist, and Wikipedia to grow exponentially. The MySQL Replication Monitor and Replication Advisor is an indispensible tools that notifies you of potential problems and send out metrics and expert advice that are relevant to diagnosing and correcting the problem.
• Ease Administration with the Administration Advisor - MySQL is recognized as a low administration database enabling DBAs to manage many more servers than with proprietary database products. Plus, MySQL Enterprise Edition provides many Advisors including an Administration Advisor, Security Advisor and Schema Advisor that help administrators better manage user & authentication and authorization, changes to database objects and eliminate security vulnerabilities.
• Reduce Database TCO by 90% - MySQL is proven to reduce database TCO by 90% enabling Managed Hosting Providers to create cost-effective offerings to a growing number of price-sensitive, small and medium sized online businesses.
• Manage MySQL on over 20 Platforms - MySQL supports for over 20 platforms, allowing Managed Hosting to acquire more customers by giving them the flexibility to choose their platform to deploy on.
• MySQL Training and Certification - MySQL offers a comprehensive set of MySQL training courses and certification program that give you a competitive edge in hosting and managing world-class database solutions. Additionally, the "Authorized MySQL Hosting Partner Program" allows you to promote your relationship with MySQL as well as receive the benefit of knowing that MySQL's millions of customers will have the added confidence in their choice of hosting vendors that carry this seal of approval.