How to Completely Eliminate Hosting Management

Don’t spend a second managing your hosting. If you’re committed to being productive in 2015, and need to choose a hosting platform (shared, server, cloud), keep reading. You’ll potentially save hours of wasted time. Cut the real costs associated with managing hosting, like a super-tech-ninja so you can stay focused.

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If you like to do things yourself, or enjoy having complete control over your environment then you may need more than shared hosting. But even shared hosting has it’s caveats that you should know about. The biggest shared hosting nightmares can be easily avoided, with these 4 proactive tasks.

4 Proactive Tasks to Master Shared Hosting:

1. Choose a good FTP password. See the GRC Password Generator.
2. Know your SMTP options. If you’re sending mail through your website like a form, find out what your host requires, and your alternate options.
3. Learn how your site is backed up. Check with your hosting provider. Ask what’s backed up, when, where and how to restore. We backup nightly for all hosting plans and you can have individual files restored (not just full backups – a huge benefit).
4. Keep your own backup. Minimally the latest copy of your site files and database. If your data is changing, make a scheduled reminder to download a copy. This one act alone could save you from huge headaches.

This advice is worth thousands (or more) to someone running an online business.

Now for those considering hosting on a Physical, Cloud or Virtual Server. There’s hundreds (or thousands) of hosts that offer “Management” but there’s hundreds of flavors of “Managed Hosting”. You need to find out exactly what that means. These tasks help uncover what you need to know and do.

5 Tasks to Eliminate Server Management Stress:

1. Start with the basics. FTP, SMTP and Backups, understanding each of these areas is critical. Ignore them and I guarantee you will regret it. See tasks for shared hosting.
2. Don’t ignore logging. Find out what’s logged on your server and how the logs are rotated. For example, on Windows the FTP and W3SVC logs, will grow until you run out of disk space. We apply a scheduled task to zip them daily, and delete them after a period of time. Make sure you know for sure how they are handled, or risk ending up with a disk full and unusable server.
3. OS Updates & Software Patches. Be sure to ask how the host handles patches and updates to installed software. There are two main benefits.
   1. You’ll know when/if the server is rebooted why.
   2. You’ll know how to ask for an update if it’s not automatically done for you.
4. Monitor your server. Minimally monitor the home page, but even more thoroughly, monitor important parts of the site like the shopping cart etc. Your host probably has options for monitoring the resources such as RAM, DISK SPACE and CPU, use them.
5. Use a control panel. Some people won’t need one (rare), but you can save time by using a control panel to manage your websites. We provide a control panel as part of our Windows VPS (ColdFusion Windows VPS, Lucee Windows VPS), cPanel VPS (ColdFusion Linux VPS, Lucee Linux VPS). The price is included with the hosting, because we feel it’s important to make the hosting management as easy as possible.

I promise that if you focus on these areas you’ll avoid having to manage the most common problems when you least expect it. There’s more complex ways to manage your server, and this may not apply to you but it’s a great start.

We’re always willing to help with your hosting strategy. If you’re serious about learning how we provide 99.99% uptime and more about our VPS managed services use the links below.

Free VPS Consultation (strategy and help getting started with Cloud Based Virtual Servers)
Shared Hosting Questions (choose “sales” from the department dropdown)

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Categories: Hosting