Routine Maintenance of Server in a Nutshell: How it Can Benefit Your Business?
What is a server solution? In a simpler way of explanation, servers are the backbones of your company. You can serve your clients, store the crucial business data, and manage your business effectively with the well-maintained server. In relation to this, a reliable IT maintenance plan will help to break down and routinizes crucial maintenance tasks and help to minimize the potential error.
What is Server Maintenance?
Server maintenance, as the name implies, involves maintaining a server updated and running so that a computer network can run smoothly. Usually, a network administrator will be tasked with the server maintenance work. This means that the network administrator has to regularly review the server’s performance and backup protocols as well as identifies any potential IT security risks. On top of that, the administrator will ensure the automated system monitoring utilities are properly installed and configured.
In some cases, if maintenance is not scheduled and conducted on a computer network (regardless of whether the network is small or large), the application software will not run as well as expected. To a certain extends, a network may even experience total (or partial) network failure without proper maintenance.
Actual Routine
Servers hum along 24/7/365, but like any machine, servers do need some maintenance. In order to keep your business’ computer network in optimal condition, you will need to perform regular server audits, installation of patches, and diagnostics.
Here is a checklist for you to take note of.
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Verify the availability your backup system
Make sure your backup solution is working before you make any changes to your production system. You can run some test recoveries before the deletion of critical data and make sure that you have selected the right backup location.
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Check the disk usage
Make sure your systems are free of old software as old software limits security issues. In fact, a smaller data footprint means faster recovery.
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Keep your Control Panel updated
Keeping your Control Panel is one of the important things on your maintenance checklist. Sometimes, updating the Control Panel does not only mean updating the control panel itself, but also the software it controls.
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Check application updates
Web applications account for more than 95% of all security breaches.
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Check remote management tools
Make sure to check your remote management tools (to see if it is working well) if your server is co-located or with a dedicated server provider.
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Check the hardware errors
As the title suggests, regular review for any signs of hardware problems is part of the maintenance. Signals such as overheating notices, disk read errors, network failures could be early indicators of potential hardware errors.
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Check server utilization
Perform regular reviews on your server’s disk, CPU, RAM, and network utilization. The regular review will tell if you are nearing limits (you may need to plan on adding resources to your server or migrating to a new one).
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Check system security
The periodic security audits serve as a check on system configuration, and other potential security risks.
Why is Maintenance of Server Important?
At this point, we can see that regular maintenance of server is crucial to every business. Just like how we take good care of our health, taking proper care of your servers will increase their life spans.
Routine server maintenance will boost server productivity and increase overall business productivity. On top of that, good server maintenance will keep your server functioning at top speed while saving you time and money.
Where to Get a Good Plan?
Maintenance of server is about being proactive and staying ahead of the game. What can you expect from a routine server maintenance plan?
- Regular Data Backup
- Patch Installation
- Daily Monitoring
At IT Solution, we understand that every business has different needs, and we are happy to offer plans that are completely customized. Just tell us what you need and when you need it and we will come up with a price point for that level of service. Apart from the server maintenance plan, we are also the one-stop managed service provider that could cater to all your IT solutions.
Contact us today to create and schedule the server maintenance routine so that your servers are free from unwanted shutdown!
