What Is Managed Hosting?

Managed hosting is a service model in which a dedicated provider -- like Petronella Technology Group -- assumes full responsibility for the provisioning, configuration, monitoring, security, maintenance, and support of your server infrastructure. Rather than purchasing and staffing your own data center hardware or trying to navigate the steep learning curves of cloud infrastructure platforms, your business gains access to enterprise-class hosting that is continuously optimized and protected by experienced professionals.

In a managed hosting arrangement, PTG owns the operational burden. We handle operating system updates, firmware patches, firewall management, intrusion detection, backup orchestration, and disaster recovery planning. Your team accesses the applications and data they need without ever having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. This frees up internal resources, reduces risk, and often costs less than maintaining an equivalent in-house environment when you factor in staff salaries, hardware depreciation, licensing, electricity, and the opportunity cost of downtime.

For businesses across Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary, Apex, and the broader Research Triangle Park area, managed hosting from PTG means local expertise paired with enterprise-grade infrastructure. You get a partner who understands both the technology and the regional business landscape, and who can sit down with you face-to-face when strategy discussions require it.

Why Managed Hosting Matters for Your Business

Downtime is expensive. According to industry research, the average cost of IT downtime for small and mid-sized businesses ranges from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per hour when you account for lost revenue, employee productivity, customer trust, and recovery labor. Poorly managed servers compound this risk through missed patches, misconfigured firewalls, unmonitored logs, and neglected backups that may fail precisely when they are needed most.

The threat landscape has also intensified. Ransomware attacks now routinely target small and mid-sized businesses because attackers know these organizations often lack the resources and expertise to defend themselves effectively. A single unpatched vulnerability on a public-facing server can be the entry point for a devastating breach. Managed hosting from PTG eliminates this gap by placing your infrastructure under continuous professional oversight.

Compliance adds another layer of complexity. If your business handles protected health information under HIPAA, processes credit card transactions under PCI DSS, stores controlled unclassified information under CMMC, or falls under state privacy laws, your hosting environment must meet specific technical safeguard requirements. Misconfiguration is not just a technical risk -- it is a regulatory one, with penalties that can reach into the millions. PTG configures and maintains hosting environments to satisfy these requirements from day one, and we provide the documentation and audit support to prove it.

Beyond risk mitigation, managed hosting enables agility. When your organization needs to deploy a new application, scale resources for a seasonal demand spike, or onboard a remote workforce, a professionally managed hosting environment can accommodate these changes rapidly and safely. Self-managed infrastructure often cannot keep pace, becoming a bottleneck rather than a business enabler.

Security, Compliance, and Zero-Breach Track Record

Security is not a feature we bolt onto managed hosting -- it is foundational to every environment we build. PTG follows a defense-in-depth methodology, implementing overlapping security controls at the network, host, application, and data layers. This approach means that even if one control is bypassed, multiple additional layers stand between an attacker and your data.

At the network level, we deploy stateful firewalls, network segmentation, and geo-IP filtering to reduce the attack surface. Host-based protections include endpoint detection and response agents, file integrity monitoring, and application allowlisting. Data protections encompass encryption at rest using AES-256 and in transit using TLS 1.2 or higher, along with strict access controls enforced through role-based access and multi-factor authentication.

All of these controls feed telemetry into our Security Information and Event Management platform, where our team correlates events, investigates anomalies, and responds to threats in real time. This continuous monitoring is what allows us to maintain, to date, a record of zero confirmed breaches across our managed hosting client base. We use qualified language here deliberately -- no provider can guarantee absolute security -- but our layered controls, proactive monitoring, and rapid response capabilities have proven effective against the threats our clients face every day.

For organizations with compliance obligations, our hosting environments are pre-configured to satisfy technical safeguard requirements. HIPAA-regulated healthcare practices benefit from encryption, audit logging, access controls, and automatic session timeouts. Defense contractors subject to CMMC 2.0 receive environments configured to NIST SP 800-171 controls. Retail and e-commerce businesses operating under PCI DSS receive network segmentation, vulnerability scanning, and log retention configurations that meet assessor expectations. We can execute Business Associate Agreements and provide the compliance documentation your auditors require.

Hosting Models We Support

Not every business has the same hosting needs, and a one-size-fits-all approach wastes money or leaves gaps. PTG offers multiple managed hosting models so your infrastructure matches your actual requirements.

Dedicated Managed Servers provide single-tenant hardware exclusively for your workloads. This model offers maximum performance isolation and control, making it ideal for compliance-intensive environments, high-transaction databases, and applications with stringent latency requirements. You get the performance predictability of owning your own hardware without the operational burden.

Managed Cloud Hosting leverages the elasticity of public cloud platforms -- Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform -- while PTG handles the management layer. We architect, deploy, secure, monitor, and optimize your cloud infrastructure, applying the same rigor we bring to dedicated hardware. This model is well-suited for organizations that need dynamic scalability, geographic distribution, or rapid deployment capabilities.

Hybrid Managed Hosting combines on-premises or dedicated infrastructure with cloud resources, connected through secure networking. This approach allows organizations to keep sensitive or latency-critical workloads on dedicated hardware while leveraging the cloud for burstable capacity, disaster recovery, or globally distributed services. PTG manages the entire hybrid stack as a unified environment.

Managed Private Cloud delivers cloud-like flexibility -- self-service provisioning, resource pooling, and rapid scaling -- within a dedicated infrastructure footprint. This model appeals to organizations that want cloud agility but need the data isolation and control of dedicated hardware, particularly those in regulated industries.

How We Onboard Your Managed Hosting

Industries and Organizations That Benefit from Managed Hosting

• Healthcare practices and medical groups that need HIPAA-compliant hosting for electronic health records, patient portals, and ePHI storage -- with BAA execution and audit-ready documentation
• Defense contractors and government subcontractors that must satisfy CMMC 2.0, NIST SP 800-171, and ITAR requirements for hosting environments that process controlled unclassified information
• Law firms and legal professionals that need secure hosting for case management systems, client portals, and electronic discovery platforms with strict access controls and audit trails
• E-commerce businesses requiring PCI DSS compliant hosting for payment processing systems, with high availability to avoid revenue-killing downtime during peak periods
• Financial services firms subject to SOC 2 Type II, GLBA, and state regulatory requirements that mandate specific technical controls for systems hosting sensitive financial data
• Small and mid-sized businesses throughout Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary, Apex, and RTP that lack dedicated server administration staff but need reliable, secure hosting for their business applications
• Organizations migrating from aging on-premises infrastructure that want a managed transition to modern hosting without the risk and disruption of a self-managed migration

Why Choose Petronella Technology Group for Managed Hosting

Petronella Technology Group has been a trusted IT and cybersecurity partner for businesses across the Triangle since 2002. BBB accredited since 2003, PTG has served more than 2,500 clients with a consistent focus on security, reliability, and responsive local support.

PTG is led by CEO Craig Petronella, a Licensed Digital Forensic Examiner, CMMC Certified Registered Practitioner (CRP), and MIT-certified professional in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and compliance. With more than 25 years of hands-on experience in IT infrastructure and security, Craig brings a depth of expertise that is rare among managed hosting providers, especially in the small and mid-market space.

Craig is an Amazon number-one best-selling author of books including How HIPAA Can Crush Your Medical Practice, How Hackers Can Crush Your Law Firm, and The Ultimate Guide to CMMC. He has been featured on ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and WRAL, and serves as an expert witness for law firms in cybercrime and compliance litigation. This forensic and compliance background directly informs how PTG designs and secures managed hosting environments.

PTG's founder Craig Petronella holds certifications including CCNA, MCNS, and Microsoft Cloud Essentials, and the firm specializes in CMMC 2.0, NIST 800-171/172/173, HIPAA, FTC Safeguards, SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, GDPR, CCPA, and ISO 27001. Our forensic specialties include endpoint and networking cybercrime investigation, data breach forensics, ransomware analysis, data exfiltration investigation, cryptocurrency and blockchain analysis, and SIM swap fraud investigation.

When you choose PTG for managed hosting, you are not getting a faceless commodity provider. You are getting a local team in Raleigh that knows your business, understands your compliance requirements, and has the technical depth to architect and manage your hosting environment for the long term.