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Tips For Server Management

Server management refers to the tasks done on the server which incorporates setup, maintenance, upgrading or some other move made on the server as a part of maintenance to upkeep the server. Server management is fundamental for everybody who holds a server. Server management can be outsourced to organizations offering server management services or it can be managed self. 

Tips For Server Management

Wednesday April 11, 2018,

3 min Read

If you outsource your server management solutions, you don’t have to worry about anything on your server, as the organization would keep an eye on your server 24/7 and maintain your server to be up and running. But if you are managing your server on your own, make sure that you keep an eye on the following areas constantly to prevent a server failure.

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Keep Your OS and Control Panel Updated

Linux system updates are announced frequently, hence you have to keep an eye on the updates. You can create a schedule for updates if you are unable to automate the updates. Make sure that your server control panel and the software it controls are updated. There are chances that even if your control panel is updated, the underlying versions used by your OS like Nginx, Apache, PHP should be updated manually to fix the issues. With the updated versions you receive real-time alerts when you are prone to vulnerabilities sent through files, emails, attachments etc

Verify backups

Ensure that your backups are working at the right backup location before amending changes to your system. You can run test recoveries if you are going to delete very important data.

Monitor RAID

A failure in the single disk can lead to a complete system failure. Hence you should be constantly monitoring your RAID.

Check disk usage

Don’t use your system as an archival storage. Delete the unused software versions as they limit security alerts. Make sure that you delete unwanted data and if your usage exceeds 90% of disk capacity, try reducing the usage or increase the storage capacity. Else your server may stop responding and all the data will be lost.

Check for hardware errors

To detect the hardware problems you need to review the logs. Any occurrences of network failure, overheating issues signals the hardware problems.

Server utilization

You should add additional resources to your server or migrate to a new server if your server’s network utilization, CPU, RAM, disk usage etc have reached the maximum limit. To monitor your system’s performance you can install systat on Linux servers.

Remote management tools `

If your servers are associated with a dedicated server provider or co-located, make sure that the remote server management tools like the console, reboot, rescue mode etc work properly.

Web applications

Web applications are more prone to attacks, hence make sure that your web applications like Wordpress, Magento etc are updated to the current versions.

System security

Periodical security audits on OS updates, system configuration etc protects your server from vulnerabilities.

User credentials

Make sure that you remove the user accounts of the people who are not currently associated to overcome security risks and change the passwords frequently.

By keeping track of the above-said items, you can stay proactive and prevent your servers from failure. If you outsource your server management services, they keep track of your server setup, maintenance, upgrading, migration etc and they fix the issues on your server before the occurrence of a server failure.