Originally Posted by tagteamcomputing
Sorry, tried to search for a thread like this but the search didnt turn anything up.
I am a former linux admin that does a small amount of hosting for clients. Because of that I don’t want to spend too much money on my dedicated server but I also don’t want to spend too much time. I am going to upgrade my server from an 8 core VPS to an 8 core Dedicated and I have been looking at the different options.
I have been using a providor that is supposed to be managed but I am not really sure what they are doing. I get an occasional notification if the server si going wonky but sometimes I dont. I run cpanel and use the updates there, I don’t really know if my host provider is doing the OS updates. I can easily run yum so not sure that is much value. I think they do have their own mod_security rules, which is helpful i guess but I dont know how it compares to the basic rules.
For what I am looking for it seems it is about $50 per month more , or $600 more pear year. That is not a ton of money but if it is not really worth it then saving $1,000 over a 2 year period is worth it to me. I usually seem to move my servers every 2 years because if you don’t then they charge you the same high amount for an old server when you can move and get a faster better one for the same.
Anyone have any thoughts on if the managed part is worth it.
$50/mo management is not going to be especially proactive. At best you’ll get updates for things that they can automatically update. They’ll hopefully make some optimizations to the server config when you first take them on, which is sometimes helpful but not really valuable on an ongoing basis.
The primary purpose of lower end management services is when something breaks that an untrained person doesn’t know how to fix, they’ll at least try to fix it for you. If that sounds worth it to you, then it’s only a matter of how good are their technicians / what problems are they capable of solving, and how quickly can they fix things when they break.
If you need or expect specific ongoing activities be done to your server, they need to be specifically listed out. Making at least some effort to check that backups are still working, coordinating repairs with the DC when a drive falls out of raid, updating / patching OS level software, all seem like things you could expect at this price level, provided they in fact promise to do those things. On the other hand, something like, someone checking the response times of key web pages, and investigate causes of slow page loads when they occur — I doubt a $50/mo management package will address that. And if they don’t advertise that they do something, assume they don’t.