Outsourcing Server Management
May 7, 2007
Does anyone here have any experience outsourcing server management? I've setup and run my own Linux server and configured my own database and PHP and Apache but I just don't have the time to keep everything running, backed-up and updated.
I'd love to have someone who I could just send jobs to, such as upgrading to PHP 5.2.2 or figuring out why Postgres doesn't start up correctly or why the logs aren't getting rotated automatically anymore or making sure the backups are happening or recovering from a hard disk failure, etc. I'm sure I could figure all this out (maybe on the second or third tries too), but I just don't have the time or the expertise these days.
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Apr 20, 2008
I don't have a control panel.
Any companies out there or systems available to do:
- bi-daily/daily backup of php and image files
- hourly/bi-daily/weekly backup of mysql databases
With easy backup and restore system.
OS is Centos.
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Nov 17, 2008
I am about to embark on a web project from home.
I have the dev machine and will need a database server and a web server (I may also want a middleware server but am undecided as of
yet).
I will be using Akamai for video.
I am trying to decide about using a hosted facility or not during development (probably a few months or so). Ultimately, the site will wind up at one due to support, back-up, load handling, etc. But, for now, I am wondering if it is the way to go?
I have looked at Dell's site. As I see it:
1) option one is to buy a 24U rack and 2 pizza-box style servers. Put it in my home for pre-release development then, when I am ready, move it to a hosted facility.
2) Option two is to rent server space at a hosted facility and upload changes accordingly.
The issues for me are - good hosted facilities are expensive and many of them don't allow
remote desktop to a server. On the flip side, I have found that some larger hosted facilities (where the site will ultimately end up) won't allow me to bring my own
hardware. So, once I buy the Dell gear, it will be pretty much useless once the site goes
to the hosted facility.
Regardless, I am leaning towards buying a rack and a few servers and having that level
of control over my hardware during development. Its an expensive initial investment but
I feel like it will save me money and headaches down the road? I'd be very interested in experienced advice along these lines.
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Aug 1, 2008
I have a few servers that host my sites, but managing the mail servers has been a pain. The configuration files are arcane and sometimes I just can't figure out why a mail doesn't show up for half an hour or more.
I looked at FuseMail but read recent reviews of them having delayed delivery and account throttling issues... so I ruled that out.
MailTrust looks clean so far, and I can do $30 per month for 10 mailboxes.
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Mar 6, 2007
I recently moved our e-mail from our dedicated server to now being handled through Google Apps premier.
I changed the MX records with our DNS provider, and have them now pointing at the Google mail servers. Thus, any mail sent to our e-mail addresses are now properly routed to the Google servers.
HOWEVER, if people use the 'contact us' form on our website, those e-mails still get routed to the old e-mails system, hosted on the machine itself.
Is there a DNS cache on this machine, telling it to send the e-mails to itself?
Or, is this just something we can't fix, since the machine doesn't look to outside DNS, since it's trying to send mail to the domain it hosts?
I forgot to mention this is on CentOS 4.4, running WHM as well,
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Jul 27, 2007
I use my dedicated server to host my own large site and web forum, and I want to stop hosting my own email server so I don't have to manage it. I want to use Google Apps for Your Domain to manage my email, pointing my MX records to Google. However, I am not clear on how this will effect PHP scripts sending email on my server. My vBulletin installation sends 1,000+ email notifications every day, which far exceeds Google's 500/day sending limit, so I obviously can't use their SMTP servers. If I'm sending mail from my own server via PHP, though, and my MX records point to Google's, how can vBulletin send an email from an address at my domain? I've been reading up on how email works, but I just can't seem to figure out how this works...
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May 7, 2008
I am taking on more clients and want to outsource all email to an established company so I can focus on what I do best. What are some excellent companies with great customer service for this service?
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Feb 3, 2008
Alright, I do not know why but all my technicians who I had hand picked right here from WHT started to leave one by one. I definitely do not think its due to price or work-load cause ALL of them first worked as staff on our help desk for a week and then fixed price themselves. I did no barging at all ~ so I suppose it was a personal problem.
I'll never forgive myself for this, but I took someone's advise and thought to give a shot at outsourcing technical support. I went up to this company called "OnLiveGlobal" - they are all Indians and thats what I needed exactly cause 50% of my customer base are Indians; I assumed I had a perfect match. And was just dreaming of all the money I could save in the process...
First Day
- excellent work; all support tickets are being answered within 20 mins and resolved withing an hour - WOW!
Second Day
Now comes t
- excellent work; all support tickets are being answered within 20 mins and resolved withing an hour - WOW!
Third Day
Ticket is open 2 hours... 3 hours... I reply and resolve it eventually. A few more tickets are opened in the process and I resolve all of them.
Then I ask for a refund on the 4th day of the service (doesn't their website say 7 days money back?) just due to the lack of service (forget satisfaction for now ). The guy named 'Sooraj' says I'll be refunded in 24-48 hours; alright I'm cool.
48 hours passes by, nothing done. I check MSN, no one is online! All the reps have probably blocked my address and/or deleted me completely of their contact list. So I find this user "onliveglobal" on WHT and PM him and ask him for some help regarding the refund. No continuous response - I fill a dispute in PayPal and now you guys have to read this... its hilarious:
I have censored and clipped a lot of personal information in the quotes below.
PayPal Transaction Details
Quote:
Transc ID: XXXABCXXXABCXXXA
Seller Name & Email: OnLiveGlobal, paypal@onliveglobal.com
Transaction Amount: XXX USD
Transaction Date: 10-Jan.-2008
Message From Seller
Quote:
...
We did get start working on their services as per our SLA. We did work on their Helpdesk and resolved tickets ABC-123456, XYZ-123456, PQR-123456, ABC-123456, XYZ-123456 and many others which are unlogged for over 2 to 3 weeks from Jan 03 and after nearly one month of using our services, the buyer claims saying he is not satisfied.
...
After reading this; instead of getting upset or whatever, I was just laughing for a full minute.
I am sure many of you will state that out-sourcing is wrong from the bottom, right and I couldn't agree any less - I wont do that mistake again (and wont dream of saving loads of $$$). I have already picked a few techs again and all good and going now
If the OnLiveGlobal representative even replies to this thread and tries to prove a point, I least care. Who ever reads this is gonna have a laugh and thats what I care now...
Just after that incident I did come across a few other companies; ThinkSupport, TouchSupport, BobCares, etc and heard that their near to perfect. I haven't lost complete faith over the outsourcing phenomena but lets see if I choose to outsource later on for something else...
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Jan 10, 2009
i have few dedi servers from one Us company, i am currently using their DNS service, we are into small level hosting, i want to run my own DNS, is it necessary to run a separate server for DNS?
Actually how the hosting companies do the name server pointing, for an example if i am buying a server and want to host a few domains in that server, what normally we do is we will change the name server to that companies name server
ns1.domain.com
ns2.domain.com
my question is if i am pointing my domains name server to the name server
ns1.companydomain.com
ns2.companydomain.com
how that company points the domain to my server for an example its ip is 72.xx.52.xx i am bit confused in this.
Also i have a doubt how they are creating this for n number of domains?
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Sep 14, 2009
We are working on our pci certification ( fun times right? ) and i was wondering what other people do for server management in the dmz. Few things we are looking at listed below. We will be doing cisco zbfw for firewalling and using NAT.
#1
Servers have 2 nics, 2 ips, gateway ect. One of the networks would be considered a "management vlan/network". Other network would be for all other traffic, including natting to the internet, and traffic to the "internal" zone but locking down traffic to source,destination, and protocol level.
On windows you really on have 1 true default gateway, and because windows doesnt just send traffic out the interface it came in, but looks at the routing table, some network routing issues popped up.
#2
Use only 1 nic/vlan/ip/gateway. Lock down traffic to source,destination, and protocol level for dmz to "internal" traffic and do an "inspect" statement to allow all necessary traffic back in and drop everything else. "Internal" to dmz would just be an inspect all because this traffic wouldnt need to be firewalled so management traffic would work just fine.
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Feb 23, 2009
If you are deploying PHP and MySQL along with a site/application, how do you do it? Do you work with the individual components, or do you lean towards ready-made packages?
I use WAMP to develop my applications, and I find it a very simple yet powerful tool for deploying Apache, MySQL and PHP to Windows platforms. I've been looking at the Zend Server today too, which strikes me as very interesting, especially the full version.
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Nov 20, 2008
Does any body recommend we3cares server management services?
I need a very simple server management and hardening job and dont want to pay much. (not for a hosting company)
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Mar 8, 2008
I'm not talking about weak sauce companies that treat your server like any other server and apply settings base a file they got saved on their desktop.
platinum server management- been there done that total server solutions - been there done that people who send me PM's - been there done that
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Mar 14, 2008
Maybe I'm underestimating the importance of server management, but I can't see how it is worth it to pay $300 per month for a server that can be built for $700 with the co-location costing about $100 per month.
So, I'm thinking that I can build a server or just buy a server that was considered excellent 2 years ago off of Ebay for about $700 or maybe less. From there, I simply need to find a $100 per month co-location hosting place and a freelance server dude to keep the thing updated for me and work out problems if they actually come up.
So with that said, where is a good place to find a freelance server manager?
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Nov 19, 2007
Does anyone know of any good reliable companies that can manage our servers remotely? It could even just be 1 server admin, however looking for a company with a good rep.
Searched on Google but wasn't able to find what I was looking for. Maybe searching the wrong keywords.
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Jun 26, 2008
I know about Platinum - I was wondering if anyone had any specific recommendations for server management services.
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Nov 11, 2008
I am planning to implement a chat software for our team.
We are currently using AIM. But, we have planned to install any software which works like AIM but it should be controlled by us.
Only, we can add or remove users. Only, we can see the chats done. To be frank, I need a software like AIM installed on a server which should be controlled by me.
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Aug 12, 2007
I initially posted a topic to get help with a problem because I want to fix it myself without wasting the time of the server management company. They however picked up the post and said I should opened a ticket with them.
The problem is however still not resolved to my satifaction after a few days because we differ on some points so can you please air your view on this matter?
-----------------
[url]or [url]
Problem 1) Certificate error that hostname and certificate name don't match.
Problem 2) At some places in WHM or cPanel there is a secure and non secure warning items.
The problem 2 is perhaps to bug in WHM V11 so it is not so important.
However, the server mangement staff insist that problem 1 is because the login is via IP (or other domain name) and not via hostname but I don't agree with them because.
a) During the years I always logged into whm or cpanel via ip or domain names and never got such error.
b) cPanel redirect any whm or cpanel access to the ssl ports under HOSTNAME so it MUST match the certificate even if you use 75.127.69.82:2087
I don't get any error if log in with [url]so it is clear that the redirection to ssl ports under HOSTNAME like above don't work correctly.
That the redirection works can be seen by using [url]because the same error comes up (for mercury.domain.com) despite the site have his own certificate.
What we have here is.
Hostname = mercury.domain.com
Certificate Name = mercury.domain.com
[url] (Works Fine because certificate name is mercury.domain.com)
[url] (Name of site don't match mercury.domain.com despite redirection to hostname IN WHM)
[url](Works fine, Host name = othersite.com and match certificate name)
[url](Name of site don't match mercury.domain.com despite redirection to hostname IN WHM)
What I suspect is that cpanel redirect but NOT to the actual hostname (mercury.domain.com) or otherwise present/display the hostname incorrectly so that it don't match the certificate.
WHM 11 setting: Redirect to ssl ports = enabled
Two further settings, redirect to hostname = enabled
(None of the settings have any effect anyway and I tested hostname, certificate name and origin domain name redirect with the same results)
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Feb 15, 2007
One of my sites has outgrown its current cheap hosting so I'm looking to upgrade. I'll probably just snag a low end, leased server from EV1 unless someone has any better ideas.
I've attempted to use a unmanaged EV1 server in the past without any setup and it was a disaster. So this time I want to pay a guy/girl to set it up properly.
My needs are not that great. I just need a server that can handle a vBulletin forum, and your typical database driven article site. At the moment, I'm only getting about 2,000 uniques per day, but the site has been growing at a constant rate.
I'm writing a new script that I think will double the sites bandwidth usage by early summer so I think I may be able to justify the expense of going from a $60 per year server to $100 per month server.
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Dec 24, 2007
any software, I do not care if it is free or paid, that will allow me to track and list all servers, what kernel versions are on them and track all changes made to each server.
I just need some sort of software that will allow me to better manage all our servers.
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May 4, 2009
After doing the proper research, I decided to lease a dedicated server from WiredTree. Let me start by saying that in the short time that I've been a customer of WiredTree.. I have absolutely loved their service! After one month, I will do a full review of their service.. because they have been absolutely amazing!
The only issue that I've had up until now is not their fault at all. When we first signed up to their service, they were aware that we were getting a dedicated server with them because of their proactive support with DDOS attacks. Sure enough.. first day up.. we were getting DDOSed.
WiredTree responded very quickly, and worked for endless hours to help us out. The issue was resolved, and the site ran great for about another week..
Then, DDOS attacks started up again and the site became very slow. Not only was Apache running slowly, but FTP/Shell would load very slowly. I asked them to assist me with the DDOS, and they did.
Now I'm just not sure of what the issue may be, because the site still loads slowly or times out for many of my members. The site loads fine for me (now), but was lagging/timing out up to this morning. - Once again, I'll note that up to now, WiredTree have been as helpful as they can possibly can.. though for them, the site has loaded in under 3 seconds the entire time. They've asked me to submit affected IPs.. and I've submitted one that I know is affected. I'm waiting to see if the IP was blocked.. though its only loading slow for them. It is not blocking them, so I'm pretty sure that they weren't hit by the firewall.
My question is.. does anyone think that PlatinumServerManagement could more for us as far as finding/resolving an issue here? Perhaps a fresh pair of eyes could help considerably..
My concern would be having two people managing the server. Obviously PSM won't do anything unless I create a ticket, requesting their help.. but would having PSM work alongside them possibly become intrusive for WiredTree?
I'm just looking for some advice on the next step. If it'd help at all.. I could post the URL so I could see if other people experience the issue.
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Mar 21, 2008
I'm thinking about using 'Platinum Server Management' to set up and later monitor a server I'm getting from FoftLayer. Anyone has any history with them?
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Mar 26, 2008
I got around 5 servers running and added one more last week. Its becoming a pain managing them all. Updating, setting up new policies and restrictions, securing or whatever other tasks that are needs to be executed on ALL these servers.
Wanted to know how you guys are doing it. I know that some hosts use HSPc, HSphere, Helm, etc to manage the entire cluster. But what about the lot who use cPanel?
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Feb 18, 2007
if there were any free resources out there that anyone know's of that could teach someone how to manage an unmanaged dedicated server? General guides will do but the more specific the better although I really cannot imagine a guide specific to my requirements but anyway
Quote:
Fedora core 6 with WHM and Cpanel
Where do people learn this stuff without having to take a course in it?
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Mar 24, 2007
any reliable server management companes who charge a monthly fee to manage your server?
so far i've used:
[url]- had a lot of difficulty with them
[url]- not bad, but a little slow in responding.g
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Nov 30, 2007
OK so I am running one powerful server. And have PlatinumServerManagement Manage it.
But Ever since I got this server The server never went down or anything like that due to high CPU usage or to many visitors.
But for some reason I am still getting emails from my members that once in a while they cant access the site because they get a "server not found error" I checked the server uptime and it never went down. The server has been up all the time. So I have no idea why these people can't access the website.
My first guess is that they are getting blocked by some security software on my server. But I talked with PlatinumServerManagement and it can't be that.
So does anyone know why they might not be able to see the websites all the times? but only some random times.
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May 29, 2009
Lots of things have improved in the last 5 or so years with regards to hosting.. faster hardware, improved control panels, cheaper bandwidth.. but the ability to keep your eye on your box whilst out and about is definitely amongst them I'd say.
So share your tech tips for when you're not at your desktop for monitoring your sites.
Key hardware: My iPhone. 3G is prevalent in my locality, but the deal on o2 means I also get free access to the two largest UK public wifi hotspots - TheCloud and BT OpenZone. Whilst some of these are free anyway (such as ones in pubs) being able to walk through town whilst on a wifi connection can be really useful if the 3G is lagging or just not there.
Software:
Pingdom - It's not the flashiest of all apps, but it tells you what you need to know - is the server up?! It'll echo all your reports for all servers into one quick and easy screen. I really hope Pingdom puts even more time and effort into this, it could make the service unbeatable with a few more features. The app is free too, which is a bonus.
TouchTerm - there's a bunch of SSH clients for the iPhone out there, I've not had chance to try any of the others but will do at some point. All my accounts are bookmarked in and I can replicate whatever I need to with ease. I've installed software and configured it with relative ease just using the touch keypad. It was either free or at most a dollar or two.
iStat - The software/server combination used to be Mac only but someone has ported the server side over to *nix now and it runs pretty well. I'm having issues with one of my boxes showing it's bandwidth usage but I'll look more into that. Live CPU/Memory figures AND graphing?! Very impressive, and if you're doing face to face with your client it's bound to be a good thing to show off (make sure it's working first tho!!). It was £1.19/$1.99 on promotion when I bought it, should still be for a little more.
Critical email accounts IMAP'd - all my key accounts are on 15minute checks, and I'll be making an emergency PUSH account for when time is very much of the essence. Having instant access to email is absolutely essential on a handheld device these days, and the iPhone does a pretty neat job of it.
EverNote - great note syncing between various boxes. No more having to ring people to jump on my laptop to read me out an IP address or similar ever again.
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Apr 24, 2008
I am trying to get a feel out there if cPanel users would pay for a service say $5.00 - $10.00 a month where they can call in to a number and have access to their system. They would be able to reboot the server, restart services, stop and start services, get server statistics etc.
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Jul 6, 2008
I may be given the task of being administrator of a website. I have never done this before.
Can anyone recommend any resources for web server management which covers things like security, efficiency, backups etc?
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Jan 2, 2007
Seeking to colocate several servers along with an FC based SAN with virtualized software, elsewhere Mysql clustering & combo master/slave setups and require a company you maybe able to suggest that could possibly be our SysAdmins, support & maintain the setup.
Additionally they will need to config sw load balancers & firewalls e.g ipcop
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Mar 11, 2007
Plesk 9.5.3
Red Hat 8
MySQL version 3.x (default with plesk).
I need MySQL version 4.0x
I have absolutely no idea how to do it.
Can someone point me to a good step-by-step guide? Or perhaps is anyone willing to upgrade it for me (I will pay, if interested, my aim is manfrincp).
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