How should a small company administer their web server?
- by John Isaacks
We currently have our website hosted by a small company that is actually a reseller for Rackspace.
They act as our server administrators. They configured the servers, handle the backups, if there is a problem, we call them and they fix it.
We are growing and want to move away from our shared server to either a cloud or dedicated server. I am thinking cloud myself but I am open to either.
The current company doesn't seem to want to offer us anything more than a shared hosting plan.
I looked into cloud solutions at vps.net, with them I would have to be the server administrator myself.
I am the website programmer but administering the server is outside my comfort zone.
vps.net does have a $99/month plan for Pro-Active Managed Support but I am not sure if this is the equivalent on a server admin that is there when you need them.
We could hire someone in house, but I think that would be overkill for our needs.
I am not exactly sure what we need, I do know we need as close to 100% uptime as we possible can. and we need the ability to add/remove/change the server configuration/software/etc. when needed (though changes shouldn't be very often once everything is setup right).
Can someone point me in the right direction? What do other companies do?
