What to do When Everything is Running Well at Your Web Hosting Business
Posted on Friday, Sep 30, 2011 in "Webmaster Resources"
Believe it or not, owning a web hosting company is not always the hectic, out of control affair we think of it as. In fact, a lot of your time may simply be spent in front of your desk playing Solitaire as the bytes travel back and forth. Your servers may finally be running smoothly on autopilot, but does that mean you should take the opportunity to kick back, relax, and stop working on your systems?
Absolutely not! When you’ve got some “down time”—and not of the server variety—you’ve got a golden opportunity to ensure your servers are smooth, slick, and up to date. You never know when the perfect storm may be just around the corner, and the smart web hoster takes every placid opportunity to give his servers a looking over.
With that in mind, here’s some ideas for you to capitalize on the next time everything is running smoothly on the home front:
- Run Updates: This seems obvious, but taking the time to ensure your servers are up to date is a must. You may have fixed every other aspect of your hardware imaginable, but when’s the last time you checked to see if CentOS added any new features? If you’re bored, can’t think of anything else to check, or just want to keep your servers running smoothly, go run your distro’s updater application and download the changes.
- Nuke The Remnants: When a tenant on one of your servers leaves, their website is deleted. At least, it should be: The truth is, most websites leave behind scripting files, or the occasional stray media cache. There are also several preference bits that tend to get stuck to your hardware. With this in mind, just troll through your file cabinets looking for “remnants,” or bits of old sites that no longer exist on your servers. Take out any loose ends, and then feel better about yourself. House cleaning is hard work, and very likely needed to be done!
- Take Another, Deeper Look: When everything is running perfectly, why not take the extra time to be sure your eyes aren’t deceiving you? Troll through some log files and look for any unseen errors. Run as many diagnostic tools as you can. If there’s an error, you’ll find it this way. If there’s not, you’ll have yet another opportunity to give yourself a pat on the back! It’s a win-win, in our eyes.
