He Ain't Heavy, He's My Server

After a week of prepa­ra­tion, iamPariah​.com and sev­er­al of my oth­er domain prop­er­ties moved to my very own serv­er this past week­end. No more vir­tu­al servers or wor­ry­ing about whether some oth­er guy’s Website is going to take down mine. Nope. Now I get all the CPU time, all the RAM, as much hard­drive space as I need, and my own DNS servers. With that, I also get the slight­ly fright­en­ing pow­er and respon­si­bil­i­ty to be my own sys admin; it’s up to me to mon­i­tor the health of the serv­er, man­age back­ups (I’m a fanat­i­cal backer-upper), and restart the machine and its laun­dry list of ser­vices and processes.

I have used and man­aged my own vir­tu­al servers con­tin­u­ous­ly since late-1994 when I launched my first Website. I under­stand FTP and all that entails; I can con­fig­ure cron jobs; I can set­up my mail­box­es, autore­spon­ders, stats report­ing, and write my own .htac­cess rules. All the typ­i­cal tasks involved with man­ag­ing Websites in a vir­tu­al or shared host­ing envi­ron­ment, I can do with ease. But now… Now I’m still con­fig­ur­ing and man­ag­ing all those options and ser­vices, but I’m also man­ag­ing the server–the entire machine–on which my domains live. There are ten­fold the num­ber of things I must now under­stand, set­up, mon­i­tor, and modify.

For sev­er­al years I owned a mid-sized Web host­ing com­pa­ny. One would think this makes me an expert sys admin. Nope. I was the CEO and had the sys­tems oper­a­tional knowl­edge of, at best, a lev­el 3 tech sup­port agent. The com­pa­ny had sys admins that did the serv­er work. I just made sure they had machines on which to do that work and cus­tomers for whom to do it.

This is unchart­ed ter­ri­to­ry for me–and I’m excit­ed to be learning.

I’m not run­ning the serv­er at my offices, of course; it’s sit­ting in a serv­er farm at a host­ing provider, enjoy­ing triple-redundancy pow­er back­up sys­tems and a very large pipe that sits only about a mile from a major back­bone hub. I man­age it remote­ly, through HTTP, FTP, and SSH (which I don’t yet ful­ly understand).

Following advice I received long ago, I have cre­at­ed anoth­er user account to make mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the sys­tem. This makes the Root user account a back­door of sorts, enabling me a way to cor­rect errors I may make in the oth­er account.

What else should I be wary of? Any saga­cious tips or advice you expe­ri­enced sys admins would like to share with this hum­ble neo­phyte sys admin?

1 thought on “He Ain't Heavy, He's My Server”

  1. Gordon Woolf

    I’m part­way there, hav­ing shift­ed from shared host­ing to a com­bi­na­tion of that with a vir­tu­al serv­er, but the final step scares me. 

    One prob­lem is that there is lit­tle pub­lished on this aspect of the Internet. What I’ve learned is as a result of the tech peo­ple who have helped me and who I’ve bad­gered to tell me what they’ve done after solv­ing a problem.

    There is plen­ty on Linux/Unix servers etc but there seems to be noth­ing which is a guide to what you have done and what I hope to do shortly.

    How about writ­ing the much need­ed guide?

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