Services
Initial consulting
Are you confused by all of the different server hosting plans out there? Not sure what you need for your business? Everyone's server needs will vary depending on the software you plan to run, the number of users you have, and the bandwidth you will be using. I will work with you to figure out what you need and make sure you have room to grow.
Initial setup
The initial setup and installation services include but are not limited to:
- Installing the server operating system
- Setting up all required services (eg: LAMP)
- Creating a secure multi-user environment
- Setting up virtual servers
- Help with deploying your web application(s).
Server monitoring and emergency response
Having some one available 24/7 to respond to your server emergencies will increase your web applications availability to its target audience. You will be able to focus more on your content and service towards your users, without having to worry about potential breakdowns.
This service includes deploying a combination of monitoring and alerting software solutions fit for your server. When a service becomes unavailable, an alert is sent, which makes an immediate response to the problem possible. Problem alerts can be sent to dedicated monitoring software or email and even hardware such as pagers, cellphones or other devices.
The problem on your server will get immediate personal attention, and will be resolved as quickly as possible.
User management
When your server requires multiple users to access a certain service, it is of great importance to have these securely managed. This is especially the case with shell access.
User management services include managing user accounts and privileges for any of your services (eg: ftp), and/or setting up and managing a server environment where multiple users have shell access with different privileges. Great care is taken in permissions settings of all files on the server. For example, special patches and options can be compiled into the kernel to prevent certain user groups from accessing sockets on your server, thus preventing them to connect to any inside or outside networks for malicious purposes. A jailshell or virtual server can be installed to isolate a user's environment from the rest of the system.
Availability
There are quite a few possibilities to ensure your services always reachable by your users.
Availability services include setting up backup servers to maintain availability when your main server goes down, and/or load balancing with either simple round robin DNS, or a dedicated load balancing server.
Security Hardening
Ensuring server security is one of the major parts of a server administrator's job and it is vital for almost every web application. Great care will be taken in following the best security practices, and ensuring a secure environment to run your server applications in.
This is includes, but is definitively not limited to: Keeping your server up-to-date with the latest security patches for your server software and kernel. To secure your server even more, special kernel patches can be applied (eg: PaX, grsecurity,...) to prevent common exploitation techniques (eg: buffer-overflow) even if a program is vulnerable. Automated scripts can check for SUID-binaries and server-wide file permission settings to make sure nothing is world-writeable, which may be a security problem. Apache can be installed in a chroot jail to restrict access of apache and any of its child processes (eg: cgi scripts) to a small subset of the filesystem. Etc...
Optimization
Bandwidth is increasingly valuable, therefore content compression for apache (such as mod_gzip) and caching for different services (eg: eAccelerator for PHP) can be installed. Compression comes with a small amount of increased cpu overhead, therefore a perfect balance between cpu load and compression will be aimed for, depending on the nature of your web application and server usage.
Personal service
Each project is unique and is treated as such. One size doesn't fit all, and because of that, your project will be discussed and studied to match a perfectly matching setup, fitting your needs.
You may communicate your every server need and everything will be done to complete the job. Communication is important when you want to know what goes on, on your server. Everything which happens on your server will be communicated or logged and available for review.
Software installation
Software updates as well as kernel and security patches and new software can be installed for your server, either automatically or upon request.