Let’s say you were a restaurant manager. It’s a slow Tuesday evening. You have five waiting staff on the floor, a sommelier, two chefs and a porter in the kitchen, and just one booking for the evening so far. The family of four comes in, you check off their reservation and give them the prime location of a window table. You serve them their meal. They spend two hours eating and drinking, and they leave, complimenting the chef on his delicious food. They’re your only customers that night. They may tell their friends about your restaurant and its wonderful service. But you can’t afford to pay all your staff and cover the costs of electricity and food to entertain a single family of four for an evening.

You check the reservations book for the following evening. You have two bookings. You tell four of the waiters and one of the chefs to take the following night off if they want, and they happily oblige. You can’t imagine it’ll be any busier than it was on Tuesday. The next evening, you serve the two parties who reserved tables. Next, a party of twenty Japanese businessmen arrive asking if they can be seated. A couple out for a romantic evening come in, asking for a table. A rowdy group of men having a bachelor party enter. The sweat is pumping from your brow long before the cheerleading squad arrives, to celebrate their college team’s win over a rival. You haven’t devoted enough resources to maintaining the restaurant. The waiters are run off their feet, the chef is working flat out. You couldn’t have predicted the resources you required for a night like this. It’s an aberration that only happens once in a while. So you’re losing money if you overpay for resources on a quiet night, while making customers angry when you don’t have enough resources to accommodate them on busy nights.

The costly overhead in maintaining a web server is comparable with this situation. You devote too many resources, and your server is lying idle. Too few resources – on those busy nights – and you get a site that is running slowly or worse – crashing due to demand. This infuriates your customers, who won’t come back. Managed hosting allows you to outsource these issues to the experts. They will best predict traffic to your site – and even if they’re wrong, they have the capacity to deal with the surplus, or devote fewer resources if things are quiet. Over provisioning or under provisioning costs are no longer a factor for your site or your company.