What are you actually paying for?
"Managed IT" gets sold as a mystery bundle. It shouldn't be. The deliverable is specific: somebody deploys, watches, and maintains the systems your business runs on, and answers for them when something breaks. The price should decompose the same way.
| Component | How it is priced | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Managed endpoint protection | Per endpoint, monthly | Antivirus, anti-ransomware, threat analytics, monitoring on every covered device |
| Managed firewall + SSO (Hydra) | Scoped per environment | Network policy and one place to grant/revoke access |
| Shared hosting | Per plan, monthly | Website, business email, DNS, databases in cPanel |
| Domain + SSL | Per domain, annual; per certificate | Registration, renewal, encryption, browser trust |
| Professional services | Hourly, or fixed after scoping | Consulting, projects, migrations, escalations |
Scoped items (firewall, datacenter, larger projects) are priced per environment because networks genuinely differ — but a legitimate provider states the number in a written proposal before work starts, not after.
What does a typical monthly bill look like?
Take a ten-person professional office in Metairie: ten workstations and a server on managed protection, hosting with business email, a domain and SSL, and a couple of consulting hours a quarter for planning. Priced per device and per plan, that managed baseline lands well below the cost of a part-time IT hire before any custom firewall or project work — and the number is in writing before anything is deployed.
Compare that with the alternatives: a junior in-house IT hire runs several thousand a month before benefits, and reactive break-fix looks cheap until you price one day of downtime during festival season — lost bookings, missed calls, and staff standing around. The managed model isn't the cheap option or the expensive one; it's the predictable one.
What drives the price up or down?
- Device count — the biggest lever, since protection is priced per endpoint.
- Server and application complexity — a cloud-light office costs less to manage than one running legacy line-of-business servers.
- Compliance pressure — healthcare practices and law firms need documentation and controls a retail shop doesn't.
- Coverage expectations — defined business-hours escalation costs less than formally committed response times under a signed SLA.
- How much is co-managed — if your office manager handles day-one password resets, you buy fewer hours.
The honest cost conversation starts with an inventory, not a quote. Anyone who prices your environment before seeing it is guessing — in whichever direction favors them.
Questions to ask any New Orleans MSP before signing
- What exactly is covered, per system — and what's explicitly out of scope?
- Who do we actually reach when something breaks, and during what hours?
- Do you run your own infrastructure or resell someone else's platform?
- What happens to our data and configurations if we leave?
- Will you put the full price, including renewals, in writing before we sign?
On the third question: Nubinity operates its own network under autonomous system AS400941 from New Orleans — which means hosting, connectivity, and support come from the same accountable team rather than a chain of vendors.