Server Management: What level is right for your business?

An important thing to consider in any hosting solution is the amount of support you receive in relation to the amount of support you actually need. When you have a dedicated or cloud server this consideration will determine whether you decide to purchase a management package and which level of management you will opt for.

Most hosts will offer a number of different support packages of varying levels of involvement. If you decide to purchase a support package, the one you go for will largely be dependent on both your overall business needs and your server management budget.

You can choose to be unmanaged, and this would mean that your hosting company did little more than house the server for you whilst you were fully responsible for it’s upkeep. This would potentially be a suitable option for companies who have employed individuals with the skills to fully maintain and manage the server. The thing to bear in mind with this is that if things go wrong, you’re largely on your own. Your hosting company can help you to a degree but if you need them to do much more than restart your server, it could cost you quite a lot in charges for one-off works.

Aside from unmanaged, here at CWCS we operate four different levels of management. Standard management is best for any companies who have the level of professionals we mentioned above but who may just need a little more assistance from time to time. Silver support is for organisations who are happy managing their day to day tasks, but need support with things like security patching and creating backup space. The next level up is Gold support, and this is for companies who either may not employ professionals who can manage a server, or do not have the resources to be able to dedicate someone who works in house to doing so. This level would be for anyone who needed ongoing technical support, server patching and a managed backup. The highest level of management offered by CWCS is Platinum support which offers much of the same aspects of Gold support but with a faster SLA and more pro active server management.  This is a good level for either anyone who has very limited technical expertise or very little experience of server management, or it may just be that your server houses a mission critical system and so you need the highest level of support available to fully protect it’s integrity. Platinum would mean that any in house IT staff that your company had would largely be free to allocate their time and resources to other projects other than server management. Which level is right for you will, again, depend on your needs as a business.

This is a good time of year to think about whether you do need a management package on your server. With the festive period of Black Friday, through Christmas, New Year and January sale time, you may be expecting an increase in traffic to your site if you host an e-commerce website. Couple this with the fact you’re likely to have an increased amount of staff on holiday throughout this period too, and you may find yourself in need of more assistance than you have currently. Some of the aspects of server management are perfectly suited to what will be common needs during the busy festive period, things like managed security patching, which will help your server to stay secure against the increased traffic, even when this may turn out not to be legitimate. Enhanced ticket response times and high level pro-active monitoring mean that if your server is struggling to cope under the pressure, you can rest assured that an expert will be on the case within a matter of minutes. The managed image back up means that if the worst happens and your server suffers an outage during a busy period, we can have you back up and running in the shortest amount of time possible.

If you would like to speak to an expert in more depth about the management offered by CWCS, or if you would like to work out what level would be right for you, get in touch with one of our experts today at [email protected] or on 0800 1 777 000.