Just like the metal in our data centre, our Server Management options have evolved a lot over the years. But those improvements haven’t always been obvious. We don’t write release notes every time Server Management gets a little bit better, and we don’t often blog about it when our team gets bigger or more efficient.
So here’s a quick recap of Server Management in recent years.
We say Server Management, you say…
There are a few different names for the same thing. You might know it as Managed Services, Managed Hosting, or one of Standard Management or Premium Management (which are the tiers that we offer). Whatever label it has, we’re talking about a situation where our expert team looks after your servers and infrastructure by:
Monitoring for issues of server health or performance and responding to them.
Undertaking maintenance that keeps things up to date and performing well.
Patching bugs and doing other security work.
Building out features and tools that start as in-house helpers but which we roll out to you as well.
That’s what our team does, but the real value is in what you don’t have to do. With fewer things to worry about your team is happier and better rested, and everyone’s work days are more productive. Running servers for yourself or your clients is a 24 hour, 7 day commitment. That can mean on-call rosters, staff working weekends, and a lot of planning to cover shifts every time someone’s away from work. Rather than spend time working on things that your customers value most, you pour hours into infrastructure instead. Even when you’re not at work, you never really switch off.
As our customer Dave Sparks puts it:
The proactive support—they think about it so I don't have to. They take the pain away and everyone on the team is happy.
“Not thinking about it” is one of the biggest features of Server Management. In fact the amount of stuff that Dave, like many other SiteHost customers, doesn’t have to think about has only grown over time.
Ongoing upgrades aren’t just a hardware thing
At SiteHost things literally keep getting better. You probably already know that we routinely upgrade our hosting infrastructure. To tie a few recent stories together, we keep an eye on new hardware releases, most recently the Ryzen 9 9000 series. By keeping up to date we know when to roll out things like our major hardware refresh of 2023, which introduced the super-modern metal we needed to launch high performance servers a few months later. That, in turn, was a major step towards the new virtualisation layer that we rolled out near the end of 2024.
We’ve also been iteratively improving on Server Management at the same time. In much the same way that today’s Dedicated Servers are better than what we were offering in 2020, Server Management is a more valuable add-on too.
Better server monitoring and incident response
We’ve always had a good feel for where to look for solutions when issues occur but nothing beats cold, hard data, and the more the better. In a years-long project we completely rethought how we monitor servers - not only what data we collect, but how we compile and visualise it, when to trigger alerts (too many and they become background noise, not enough and the siren goes too late), and what to share with customers like you.
Simpler examples of the data at our disposal include network traffic and usage of CPU, disk and memory. We can zoom in on minutes, or see years at a time. Better monitoring means fewer problems missed and sharper tools for investigating, understanding and fixing problems quicker than ever. We often get the job before anyone else notices. No disruption to you, or your users.
Speaking of you, we haven't kept all this good stuff to ourselves.
This new monitoring stack came online last year in three stages. First we started using it internally, and the results were clearly positive. Next came the massive metrics upgrade for users of Cloud Containers in June, which was a first glimpse for customers. A couple of months later managed servers received the same treatment. Unmanaged servers missed out because unmanaged means unmonitored. It's a big change from the handful of graphs that you could see before 2024.
A bigger round-the-sun team
It’s coming up to four years since we could first claim a truly round-the-sun team. Since then we’ve learned a lot of lessons about running a distributed team, and we’ve increased the amount of expertise that you can call on at any time of day or night.
Back then we had two carefully-placed team members on the job, one in the Americas and one in Europe. The benefits of the system proved big enough to keep on building, and today’s coverage is much more thorough.
Why do things this way? Because outsourcing is off the table, and because we look for high-quality team members. As we said shortly after establishing our round-the-sun team:
We have always delivered support around the clock. In the early days that meant our Technical Director, Quintin, slept with a phone next to his bed [he still does, by the way, but it rings much less now]. Later on it meant running a night shift. But we want to employ the best engineers in town and reasonably enough they won’t jump at the chance to work vampire hours.
What’s true for customer support is true for Server Management. Today we have personnel in at least three timezones, and a big enough team to cover weekend nights and public holidays, too. The days of a more ad hoc approach to after-hours service and support are over.
More proactivity
A bigger team with better monitoring tools can do more to protect managed servers from external threats. Take the example of over-enthusiastic bot traffic, which we have seen a lot of lately. Many of our hours have gone into identifying unusual spikes in traffic on our network, confirming that it’s illegitimate, tracing it back to the source or sources, and carefully rate-limiting or blocking it.
The goal is preserving server resources for site visitors that you actually want (whether human or good bot). We wrote the mid-2024 story of Bytespider and Claudebot from a Cloud Containers angle, but the same principles apply to managed servers.
The measured and effective response that we took to those two bots last July was much more elegant than the more sledgehammer-like approach we used on a different bot back in early 2023.
We’re always questioning whether we can do better next time, always learning, and putting lessons into action next time. And all of that accumulative experience feeds into Server Management.
More options for the stacks you can run
Server Management isn’t only about the tin and networking gear, but also the stacks that you run. We’re huge fans of LAMP stack, so we appreciate that it’s an acronym that’s taking on more and more over time.
M used to definitely mean MySQL, but now MariaDB is an equally likely candidate.
L still stands only for Linux, but the range of distros and versions that we support has grown. With the end of CentOS, we brought in support for AlmaLinux to allow a smooth migration path.
Apache and PHP keep rolling out new versions as well, and we add support every time. It’s very rare for us to ever remove support for anything, because we want to stay as flexible as LAMP itself.
In a similar way, the number of prebuilt container images that you can select on Cloud Containers is an ever-growing list (we added Silverstripe in January, for example), and every one of them is supported by our team.
Managed Cloud Containers are more powerful for developers
When it comes to Server Management, Cloud Containers are a little bit different to virtual or dedicated servers.
For example, we maintain the Cloud Container platform for every customer, whether their servers are managed or unmanaged. That’s because the fleet needs to evolve as a whole rather than splinter into multiple versions. It’s only by running Cloud Containers as a product in this way that we can provide the kind of support that we know you demand.
All of that said, managed Cloud Containers are still a more powerful proposition.
There’s a set of developer-focused features that are only available on managed Cloud Containers, including:
Container cloning and syncing.
Simple Cache, which removes the pain of manual cache management with a single switch.
One-click backup restoration.
Scheduled maintenance, including image upgrades, performed by our team.
Possibly our most valuable upgrade
Our servers are incredibly configurable, and every customer is different, so there’s no way to say which customisation option or add-on is most valuable. But for a lot of customers the value of Server Management is hard to beat.
What’s a few hours of your team’s time worth each month? How about a full night’s sleep? Or websites with performance that doesn’t deteriorate just because time passes? What value do you place on a 24/7 approach to security?
How about all of those things at once?
Nick Hayman from Panel Quote sees the value:
If you want personalised service and spectacular support, and outstanding knowledge, go to SiteHost. The support coming from SiteHost is like nothing I’ve ever seen, and I've been around for a while. I've seen a few different server companies, but I’ve never seen service like this before.
You can talk with us about adding Server Management today, or to ask how it could work for your business. We’re confident that you and your team will be glad that you did.
Hammock image by StockSnap from Pixabay.