hosting service provider (HSP)

A hosting service provider (HSP) is a service provider that provides the infrastructure, management and applications for application hosting and web hosting. This includes outsourcing of the web infrastructure as well as the management of all data assets.

In addition, IT security requirements represent a major cost factor for many companies, which is also handled by HSPs. Here, the elaborate technologies and concepts, such as the Public Key Infrastructure( PKI), and a security architecture based on certificates and encryption play an essential role.

Hosting service providers distinguish between different service levels. The simplest service level is collocation, where the servers are owned by the customer and the hosting service provider takes care of providing the space for the server, the network connection and other basic services as part of the collocation services. In the next higher service level, Basic Managed Hosting (MH), the HSP provides the server and the operating systems, but only a few services. The highest service level is Complex Managed Hosting (CMH). Here, the HSP provides the hardware and additional services and services, such as database management, content delivery, and others. The services, services and performance of a hosting service provider can be precisely specified by service level agreements( SLA).

In modern IT, a hosting service provider can be a cloud provider that provides cloud services to enterprises. Transferred to a hosting service provider, it can offer infrastructure-based services such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service( IaaS), cross- platform services such as Platform-as-a-Service( PaaS) and storage-based services such as Storage-as-a-Service ( SaaS) via cloud computing or cloud storage.