Uptime and Monitoring Your VPS or Dedicated Server
One of the most important factors that you should be constantly monitoring with your VPS or dedicated server, especially if you host clients on it, is the uptime of it; this means that you should always be using some type of monitoring service to ensure that your VPS or dedicated server is online, and if it isn’t you need to ensure that you are notified of the down time ASAP so that you are able to sort the problem out yourself, or notify the support team of your web host to ensure that the down time caused is minimal and that your server will come back online ASAP.
If you are a web host which is providing a responsible and sensible service, then in your terms and conditions you will probably have conditions set out regarding up uptime, which in most cases states things such as if a customer’s service is down for over a certain amount of time, or if the monthly uptime record doesn’t meet the one which is guaranteed then customers are able to request a refund; this in itself should provide you with the motivation to fix a server problem if you have set such rules out in your terms and conditions, since most companies wouldn’t want a servers worth of customers requesting refunds since they don’t think they have been provided with the amount of uptime which has been guaranteed. Most web hosts use their own internal monitoring system for their servers, since in most cases it will alert them quicker to a problem than an external solution would since an internal system is most likely monitored more closely, but with an external solution in place as backup in case the internal one fails. One thing to consider is that most external monitoring services monitor your website or server from multiple geographically different locations which means that they are able to provide a more reliable source of information when it comes to checking to see whether your VPS or dedicated server is online or not when compared to a monitoring system which is monitoring your VPS or dedicated server from one location or from one country or data centre, which means that the produced results might not always be accurate and reliable.
When considering uptime solutions for your VPS or dedicated server, you should always take into consideration the effect that a program might have on the performance of your VPS or dedicated server; for example if you use an internal solution then you might need to install an ‘agent’ program which posts data about your server back to the master monitoring node, since information such as the speed that your server’s CPU is running at and the amount of memory that your server has left are factors that can only be gained by internal access to your server unlike other factors such as whether certain services are running or not that can be found out easily via pinging the port which the service runs on. You want to try and maximize the uptime of your VPS or dedicated server, which means that you should optimize the programs that you have installed on it, so that they don’t use up too many resources since the most common reason for a server crashing is that there aren’t enough resources available to keep the operating system going, which means that it just crashes because it is unable to run for any longer on the scarce resources that are available for it.
To maximize the uptime of your VPS or dedicated server, in the case that you are running the Microsoft Windows Server operating system, you should ensure that you have Microsoft Update scheduled to run at a certain time, since in most cases it will require you to restart your machine once that you have installed the updates; if you schedule the updates to take place at a certain time of day when the server isn’t going to be accessed much, as such as midnight then you should be able to minimize the disruption that is caused to you and your customers. If you are using a VPS or dedicated server that you have purchased from a web hosting company, then you should ask them about the monitoring services that they are able to provide you with; if you have co-located your own dedicated server then you can always ask the data centre in which your server is located about the monitoring services that they provide - although both solutions would be internal, the price that you would be charged might be less than that for an external service.
Uptime
As previously mentioned, you should try and maximize the uptime of your VPS or dedicated server to ensure that if you are hosting clients on the machine concerned, that they are happy with the level of service and uptime that you have provided them with; if you fail to provide them with a certain amount of uptime then in most cases they will request a refund - this will most likely happened if you have set out a sensible terms and conditions policy which states that if services that you provide fail to stay up for a certain percentage of a period of time, in most cases a month, customers can request for their money back.
If you are using your VPS or dedicated server to host one primary website, then you might find that your website is losing visitors since your server is unable to stay up for a respectable amount of time; this means that if you run a website which you use to make money, such as online shop or an advert supported website then you might also find that your income from your website is decreasing since the amount of visitors that you are receiving is decreasing as well. One way in which you can easily increase and uphold the uptime of your VPS or dedicated server is to optimize both the operating system and the programs that you run on your VPS; by doing this you are ensuring that there are more resources available for use by other programs that are on your VPS or dedicated server, since you have reduced the amount of resources that were being used by other programs that you have installed and running on your VPS or dedicated server hosting - an article which can help you with optimizing your VPS or dedicated server hosting for lower resource consumption can be found here.
If you are running a VPS or dedicated server that has low specifications, but is running cPanel then there is a new version of cPanel which you can use within your dedicated environment that will ensure that the amount of resources that cPanel uses is much less than what the standard version uses, which means that you are able to host more websites and domains on your VPS or dedicated server allowing you to use it as much as possible; a useful article discussing this new optimized version of cPanel and the changes that have been made in it can be found here.
If you are a web host that displays its uptime statistics on a part your website, then you should always try to maximize the uptime of your servers since if customers see a high percentage of uptime, then they are more likely to purchase a hosting package from you; this rule is more likely to apply to businesses and customers who require a high percentage of uptime to ensure that they are able to sell their products through their website still, in the case that they are running an online shop through their website. If you do need to carry out emergency maintenance such as the installation of new updates and hardware that will require for a server to be switched off for a certain amount of time or for one to be restarted then you should try and schedule these tasks to be carried out late in the evening or in the middle of the night since less disruption to customers will be caused at this time. If you do schedule for maintenance tasks to be carried out during the day then you could annoy a large amount of your customers or website visitors, and might even lead to some leaving your company or going elsewhere for the information that they might need; this is because most visitors come to websites during the day which means that daytime maintenance would cause the most amount of disruption to people which is the mean reason as to why it should be avoided.
Monitoring Systems
One of the most important tools which you should use when trying to maximize the uptime of your VPS or dedicated server are monitoring systems, since they are able to alert quickly if your VPS or dedicated server goes down, or if in the case of an internal monitoring system, whether there is an internal problem with the server such as a low amount of memory available for use by the operating system that you are running as well as the programs that you have installed on your server; this means that you are able to be notified of any problem as soon as possible, allowing you to alert your web host’s support team of the problem so that they can fix it for you, or so that you can then fix the problem yourself. If you are to use an internal monitoring system for the monitoring of your VPS or dedicated server, then you are able to gain the ability of being able to monitor internal resources of your server such as the amount of CPU which is available for use by the operating system and programs that you have installed on your server, as well as the amount of memory that is available for use by the programs that you have installed on your server; however, one thing that you are losing with the use of internal monitoring systems is that you aren’t able to monitor your server from different parts of the world to ensure that it is reachable from almost any country that visitors to your website might originate from.
If you choose to use an external monitoring system for your server than you are able to have the status of your server monitored from multiple geographical locations, thus ensuring the most accurate results when producing a chart to show the uptime of your server; with the use of external monitoring systems you are unable to monitor the status of particular resources within your server, you can however monitor the status of different services that are running on different ports of your server. If you are hosting clients on your VPS or dedicated server then it is important that you use an external monitoring system that is able to provide you with accurate results and that are able to produce graphs for you; this is because you might have customers complaining about the uptime of a particular server, which means that with the use of graphs and other material you can easily prove them wrong as they can be used as evidence.
If you don’t actively monitor your VPS or dedicated server then you might find that it is going down without you knowing; this can prove to be annoying for you since if you use the server concerned as an email server, then you might find that any email which has tried to be sent to has gone astray and that if you are using it as a web server, then your website visitors won’t be returning since your website has been down for too long - if you host clients on it then you might have some of them asking to leave you since the server has been down for a period of time with no communication on your half. If you are to purchase an external monitoring solution, then you should always take into consideration the number of external locations from which it monitors your server or website, since the higher the number the more accurate the results produced are likely to be, and it also means that the monitoring vendor has plenty of failover is one of the monitoring servers that they use was to fail; with the use of geographically located monitoring systems, you are also able to ensure that your website is accessible from different countries - for example it might be accessible from one country but not from another, for a reason such as the country from which your website does work doesn’t employ a country level web block, whereas the country from which your website doesn’t work has deployed one since they don’t want citizens viewing certain material on the internet.
Conclusion
In conclusion, with the use of either internal or external monitoring systems, you are able to maximize the uptime of your VPS Hosting or dedicated server, thus ensuring that your customers, if you host them on your server, are happy with the service and level of uptime that you have been able to provide them with; you are also ensuring if you use your server for other purposes such as for receiving emails or for a website that emails are received as often as possible, and that visitors will still return to your website thus increasing your amount of revenue that you earn from adverts if applicable. You can also optimize your VPS or dedicated server as well as the programs that it runs to ensure that the amount of resources used is far lower, thus ensuring that you can install some more applications on your VPS or dedicated server or leave it as it is so that it is able to run fast; if running cPanel, then you can use the new optimized version since this will run much fast on a lower specification machine since it has been designed to take up less memory and utilize less CPU.
If you choose to use an internal monitoring system then you gain the ability to monitor internal factors of your server, such as the amount of CPU and memory that is available for use by the operating system and programs that you have installed on your VPS or dedicated server - this is very important if you are running a server which is hosting web hosting and design clients, since you don’t want their websites going down because of a lack of resources. Other factors which you might want to consider when choosing a monitoring system is the accuracy of the results that are collected and in turn produced; for example, with an external monitoring system you will want to be considering how spread the multiple geographical monitoring stations are and with the case of an internal monitoring system, you should find out whether internal server resources can be monitored or not - this will give you an advantage since you will be able to monitor all aspects of your server then, both internal and external which means that accurate results should be produced.


























