When and why do you need server maintenance?
Everyone knows that a car’s regular technical checkups can prevent it from breaking down. In the same way, constant server monitoring and maintenance can prevent server errors and issues from turning into server downtime. As an example - we had some clients that called us asking for help with their server that stopped running unexpectedly.
The most common reasons for that were:
- their disk had no free space (and this led to database corruption)
- their backup mechanism stopped working last month
- they didn’t have any log rotation.
Using a professional, high-quality server management service will let you forget about the server-side issues that may appear. It should cover the full spectrum of tasks that might arise on your server. You can feel carefree, as there is a qualified team of engineers who know what to do.
List of top reasons why you need server maintenance
Backup and restore all sensitive data
In any live project, one of the most important things is having a backup. You always need to have the ability for a quick server and/or website restoration in the case when:
- your server is attacked by a hacker
- your database is corrupted
- the server is simply destroyed in a fire or storm.
External backup storage
We highly recommend having external backup storage that is not tied to your production environment. Our experience shows that Amazon S3 is stable and reliable storage you can count on. Having a backup of the production server on the same host or environment is not a good idea at all.
In case of a hardware disk error, your backups will be lost together with your production database and all important business data. In the best practice approach, your backup policy must use external backup storage! Even better to have it in a totally separate datacenter or hosting provider. Why? If your hosting provider has unexpected problems with its operation on all levels, you'll be able to get your files and restore them somewhere else.
Backup monitoring
Another critical point of backups is their monitoring. You should always be aware of successful backup copies made to external storage. Your backup tool should log the result of every run, and your monitoring should immediately alert you in case a backup job fails or doesn't run at all.
Quick rollback solution
Most of the projects are evolving and changing. That also includes code deployments to the production environment. The most important thing during any kind of changes done on production is having a quick and fail-safe rollback solution. It doesn't matter whether it is a code update or an infrastructure change. That allows getting back to the website’s/server’s previously working condition.
You may even delete something on production accidentally (Ouuups!). A working, regularly tested backup will protect you from destroying your business, even if you made a bad mistake. Also, it will give you an opportunity to restore a server and website quickly without losing your visitors and customers.
Keep it clean!
It is very important to track all changes and collect logs that can be used for the investigation of the system's behavior. For example, if you feel that you are under a bot attack - you can check it by analyzing the logs. Using the production environment as storage for logs, backups, and software versions is a common error.
Keep your production storage as clean as possible:
- implement log and email rotation
- delete the old software
- make sure you do not have any unneeded trash on a server.
Why? Because old logs, backups and files slowly eat up free disk space, and they also make your backups bigger: the more data you back up, the longer a restore takes. If your disk is close to being full, we strongly recommend deleting something old or expanding your storage. When disk usage hits 100%, services and databases can't write data anymore, your server may stop responding, and important business data might get corrupted or lost!
Correct and detailed monitoring, alerting, and emergency reaction
Each business owner dreams about high availability, zero downtime, and smooth work of their project. In a vacuum that's possible:
- it does not have any problems
- it does not require any urgent involvement to fix errors
- it's set up once and for all
Unfortunately, that's possible only in a vacuum, where all possible problems disappear. If you are using the cloud - you are a step closer to this dream since a cloud provider takes care of the hardware issues by itself.
If you’re a dedicated server owner, you need to be sure that:
- your hardware is not overheating
- there are no disk errors
- the network is stable, etc.
Basic server metrics monitoring
To make sure your server is running smoothly you need to be confident that the following metrics are within normal limits:
- server’s disk
- CPU
- RAM
- network utilization
It's good to have alerting levels to make sure you can react to the issues without digging in the wrong direction. For example, we suggest using such levels with different thresholds:
- OK
- warning
- critical.
For a comprehensive, high-quality monitoring setup for your business, read one of our previous articles on the proper organization of a monitoring system.
Software and services monitoring
Nowadays monitoring of your server’s hardware is not enough. You need to make sure you are monitoring all services and software that are running on your server. It will be easier to understand where the problem is when you have a comprehensive overview of server metrics.
The best way to be aware of resource utilization is to have a monitoring tool covering all system components actively and alerting you in case something goes wrong.
Immediate reaction and emergency support
However, being aware of your server’s condition is not enough. Each business owner needs to make sure that someone reacts to alerts 24/7 and fixes the issues in case they occur. Proper server maintenance covers every system component whose condition may affect your business productivity.
ITsyndicate provides 24/7 monitoring, proactive server management and emergency support with no excuses. If you want to know more about our maintenance plans, see our proactive server management service and contact us to get more information. Each project is unique and needs an individual approach.
Proactivity and failure prevention
We like when everything runs smoothly, so our clients can feel calm about their servers and business. When an issue arrives, the #1 priority is to solve it and get the system back to a stable working state. After the issue is resolved, the expert server maintenance team analyzes what happened to prevent similar errors from happening in the future.
Zero downtime and error prevention
An experienced system administrator should know how to harden/optimize the places where similar issues might occur, but haven't occurred yet. Our team is managing projects that face zero downtime during updates and keep running without failures for years. This is a result of timely updates, correct and clever server and website hardening, and a proactive approach to fixing issues.
Automate OPS work
Our motto is: “Automate things. Automate updates. Do not wait for problems - prevent them!” We highly recommend automating server maintenance and configuration in order to minimize the risk of possible errors and bugs. If you cannot automate the update process - dedicate some time that is comfortable both for you and your customers and perform the updates manually.
Usually, it’s done overnight, when the traffic is minimal. In the beginning, we did a lot of things manually, and it worked pretty well with a small number of servers. But once your business grows along with the volume of your web project - there is a big chance to miss something during manual updates. Never forget about the human factor, let the machine do the operational work.
Security of your business and data
We’re sure that security is as important in each project as backups are. Making sure that your website and server are protected from unauthorized access is a top priority! As for security - we'd highly recommend you use a Web Application Firewall and basic protection approaches.
Following them will significantly reduce the risk that someone exploits a vulnerability in your application or server. From the infrastructure part - you need to cover all layers of security and minimize the risks of hacking. You can read more about common security errors and how to properly secure a website and server in our blog post.
Focus on your business growth, not on server maintenance
The goal of server management and our mission is to let you forget about server-related problems and let you focus on your core business and its expansion. You do not need to worry about ops tasks - all you need to do is to let your server maintenance team know what job needs to be done.
ITsyndicate server management and support service makes sure that your server and website are running stably, smoothly and without any problems. You will always have a responsible support engineer who is available to help you and perform your requests, answer your questions or just make sure that everything is running with no errors.
With a proper server management service, you don’t have to worry about keeping your software up to date or about any kind of updates. If you’re paying for a service that covers the full spectrum of server-side work, your server protection and software updates should be included by default.