Web Hosting Blog :: Ubiquity Hosting Solutions

Well, it depends on who you’re talking to.  Everyone defines server management differently and at the current time, there are no industry standards on what “server management” means.  To some providers, it simply means replacing hardware that goes bad.  To other providers, it means programming your scripts for you, setting up email accounts, and actively monitoring your firewall logs to check for an intrusion.  What’s generally true everywhere though is that the scope of the management is largely what you pay for it.

So what does management mean with Ubiquity?  We’re right in the middle of the pack with both our pricing and what we provide.  When we manage a server, we are responsible for:

* Hosting Software updates (Apache, MySQL, etc.)
* Operating system updates
* Software Firewall services
* Backup services (if purchased, not included by default)
* Advanced technical support
* Server monitoring and recovery
* Anti-spam and virus protection
* Security scans and audits
* Some Advanced configurations
* Control panel software updates

That isn’t a complete list – it would be a daunting task to itemize everything that is included and not included.  The general concept, though, is that for $20/month ($50 including the required control panel,) we’ll keep an eye on a long list of things related to the hosting environment itself and proactively fix them if something goes wrong.

Who needs management?  Well, it’s not necessarily just a server novice that needs it.  Oftentimes the demands of proactively monitoring a server are too time consuming for even the most advanced server users – and $20/month is a small price to pay for the peace of mind that your server may go down at 3 am, but someone is already working on it for you.

Which brings us to why management – why would anyone need someone else to keep an eye on their server?  Won’t your site visitors, customers, friends, or employees tell you if your server goes down?  Sure, they might do that.  But then you’ll still need to know how to fix the problem.  The complexities of maintaining a web hosting environment are seemingly limitless.  It takes Ubiquity about two months to train someone in-depth on fixing most problems and it’s about two years before a tech is really seasoned enough to know 95% of the problems.  Having a single server, even for years, will never expose you to what can go wrong with your server.  And when something goes wrong, that’s when you need a fix as soon as possible by someone who knows how to fix it.

While things said and done online have always been pretty permanent, for example, you can still read thousands (if not millions) of Usenet posts from the ’80s, it seems like every day people come up with new ways to keep archiving the Interwebs.  Thanks to digital storage becoming ever cheaper the things you post online will likely be there for the foreseeable future.  One such reminder is Twitter (www.twitter.com) handing over every public tweet to the Library of Congress.

On one hand, it’s not terribly groundbreaking – the LOC could have simply used the Twitter API to look up every tweet and copy it.  On the other hand it’s a landmark step in the direction of the LOC keeping historical copies of important events that happen online.  For the rest of time, Barack Obama’s first presidential tweet will be a part of the Library of Congress.  It’s really a neat recognition of how social networking sites can document significant events just as much as things that happen offline can.

What’s interesting about this, is that Twitter doesn’t actually delete tweets – even if you’re like me, someone who “tweets and deletes” (I delete my time-sensitive tweets) they’re never really deleted; just flagged by Twitter not to show publicly.  There’s no information right now on whether or not those tweets will be included in the LOC, but presumably they won’t because they’re not publicly visible.

So keep on Tweetin’ your way into the Library of Congress.