Your own System Admins at your Fingertips….

Did you know we provide management services for servers not purchased from us? We have a growing client base of people around the globe who rent a self managed or an unmanaged server from another provider and pay us to manage the server for them. It’s like having your own system admins in house but paying a fraction of the cost.

What is a Self Managed Server?
Sometimes called unmanaged, a self managed server is one that is provided by a data centre that you manage yourself. The data centre is responsible for the hardware and the connectivity (ping) but any software you install or custom configurations you make are 100% on the client and most data centres charge fees of £50 per hour or more if you need them to help manage a self managed servers.

Why might I need management.
Take a look at some of the tasks that would typically be configured by system admins on a fully managed server that you would be expected to complete yourself

• Kernel Upgrades
• Operating System Patches
• cPanel Upgrades
• Error troubleshooting
• High Load Troubleshooting
• PHP compilation
• MySQL upgrades
• MySQL tuning for better performance
• Firewall configuration
• Best effort third party application support
• Database corruption assistance
• Backup and Restore assistance (assuming backups are available)
• etc etc

Example One: WordPress Design Studio – England
One client has a self managed dedicated server from Poundhost in their Maidenhead data centre. This client has a team of staff who are relatively good at Linux but the client wanted a second set of backups to be taken off site to a third party provider (BWF in this instance). This client pays us to set up and manage R1Soft Enterprise Backup on his server and he has a 30 day retention of data on our backup cluster. The client hopes he will never need our backups but he is safe in the knowledge that should disaster strike he has a set of backups and we can help him quickly restore his clients websites back. As part of his management plan and monthly cost we promise him up to 24 hours technician time in an emergency to perform restores as well as ensuring the backups are working on our network. It’s like an insurance policy for this client and in our view worth every penny.

Example Two: Business and Tourism Website – South Africa Cape Town
This client runs a very successful local business website in Capetown from the largest Digital Ocean Droplet available. It’s rare to see people use Digital Ocean for production websites but this client has been using this for a while. We help him with the day to day management of the server dealing with problems and issues as they arise. We also have backups configured for this client that run every night to our backup cluster and we promise to help this client to the best of our ability. We treat his third party server as if it were ours and we monitor it 24/7.

Example Three: Web Design Studio – Northern Ireland
This client has a VPS server from Heart Internet. Heart Internet sell Self Managed VPS servers and this client needed additional help in managing his Heart Internet cPanel server. We manage this server as if it were one of ours and we also have backup set up for this client.

In Conclusion…
We do offer a free migration service into us and many of our remote managed clients do see the light and eventually move to us directly but for now if you have any servers elsewhere and need help with management just drop us a line and we’ll look after you for a competitive price. It starts at £15 per month for our basic service…so is certainly an affordable option.