Management of servers in an efficient manner helps you ensure smooth running, avoid downtime, and do proper maintenance of your data.
If you are the manager of the company’s servers or interested in knowing the best ways of managing a server, then best practices can save you time and money.
Here are some easy-to-follow guidelines that can help you manage your servers effectively.
1. Regular Monitoring of Your Servers
One of the most important things you can do for your servers is monitor them.
Monitoring allows you to keep tabs on such key metrics as CPU usage, how much memory is being consumed, and how much disk space is available.
There are many server monitoring tools to alert you in case something’s wrong. Take some time to set up alerts for performance issues, security breaches, or possible failure cases, so you can have a chance to fix them.
Why it’s important: You’re constantly a step ahead of any possible issues before they grow into a real problem and worsen. That’s why you get uninterrupted server performance.
2. Keep Your Servers Updated
Server updates are not just new features, they’re also kind of necessary for security. Servers’ software, operating systems, and applications are regularly updated to fix bugs or holes that hackers and malware can exploit.
Schedule the installation of your maintenance windows, so you can perform it during off-peak hours, chancing which won’t be too inconvenient for your users or customers
Why it’s important: Upgrading your servers ensures that you prevent the bad guys from bringing their security threats to your business, besides improving its performance.
3. Automate Routine Tasks
Automation is your best friend when it comes to managing your servers. It permits you to automate most of the routine jobs such as backup system update monitoring checks. This not only saves time but also minimizes human error.
Start-ups, clearing of memory, and system log management can be done using automation. While this helps streamline server management with consistency, it frees up your time for more strategic tasks.
Why it’s important: Automation reduces error due to human mistakes and saves time by streamlining routine processes.
4. Back Up Your Data Regularly
It could happen to anyone. You never know what might happen, and those consequences may be pretty dramatic. That makes a proper backup strategy indispensable.
Regularly created backups can help ensure that you will have some chance of returning to an optimal level after a problem has occurred, whether this is due to hardware failure, cyber attack, or accidental deletion.
Schedule automatic backups at least daily. Store them in a secure, off-site location. Cloud storage is an excellent choice for backups: it provides redundancy and is easily accessed from anywhere.
Why it’s important: This ensures that your data is safe and can be quickly restored in case of an emergency.
5. Set Up Redundancy and Failover Systems
Even if you manage your servers well, it’s bound to happen.
Hardware failures, power outages, or even natural disasters are set to disrupt your server operations. That is why it’s necessary to have redundancy and failover systems installed.
For example, in the case of your main server breaking down, it has a backup server that can automatically take over its work.
Why it’s important: When you do redundancy and failover systems, then no downtime can be caused and ensures business continuity while running something during an unscheduled event.
6. Perform Regular Performance Tuning
Server performance can degrade slowly over time because of heavy traffic, old hardware, or inefficient configurations.
To ensure that your servers run at peak capacity, you must do performance tuning periodically. Begin with the analysis of key metrics, such as how the server responds, used memory, and server load.
Why this matters: Ongoing performance tuning keeps your servers running at peak levels and avoids slowdowns.
7. Set Up Access Controls
Who accesses your servers is one other important activity of server management.
You need to implement RBAC (Role-based access control (RBAC) so that access to certain aspects of the server is only granted to those with privileges.
Why it matters: Role-based access control ensures your servers’ security because nobody can proceed to sensitive areas without proper rights.
Conclusion
Good management of servers involves monitoring, automation, security, and cost optimization.
After following up on best practices, you can ensure that your servers operate smoothly, in a secure manner, and with minimal costs.
Ensure your systems stay updated, automate routine tasks, and back up data regularly to prevent problems later. Also, institute robust security practice redundancy systems to help in the prevention of a business even in running operations in case things go wrong.