Web Server Configuration
What is a Web Server?
Your web server is a hard working member of your marketing team.
It is a high-tech combination of computer hardware and software.
Your web server provides a combination of information, pictures, and features to current and potential customers. It works tirelessly on your behalf 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year with the exception of scheduled maintenance and unforseen circumstances.
Most unforseen circumstances are due to not having a proper maintenance plan.
Web Hosting Scenarios
There are a variety of web hosting scenarios including:
- Your Internet Service Provider hosts your web site on a shared machine (shared virtual hosting).
- Your Interent Service Provider hosts your web site on a dedicated machine
- You configure and run your own web server at your facilities.
This section of our site is geared to people in the last two categories who require server configuration and maintenance.
Why is Maintenance Required?
Some people have a web server configured for them then blindly sail along hoping everything is okay. Ignorance can provide a great feeling of confidence and security until something goes wrong and your ship blindly crashes into the rocks. Anyone who's ever hit the rocks will tell you it's better to sail with open eyes and avoid the finger pointing and "I told you so" scenarios.
You should be aware of the following facts:
- Every piece of software, including the software needed to run your web server, may have bugs in it that could become a potential security hole.
- Your web server may eventually run out of disk space
- Your web server may run out of resources including:
- Hard disk
- Database connections
- CPU
- Memory
Typically web server performance quickly goes from decent to almost unusable when one of these limits has been reached.
As with any server connected to the Internet, it is important to ensure you the latest security updates are installed. Almost all of the havoc caused by the "Code Red" worm that gained international media attention could have been elimiated if system administrators had listened to Microsoft security bulletins and installed security patches that had been freely available for months.
Recommended Maintenance
Most of the problems mentioned above can be anticipated or avoided by:
- Promptly install operating system and web server security patches. This will allow your server
- Read your server logs. They will often warn you about a problem before it becomes too late to do anything about.
- Monitor your server's health and performance
- Regularly back up all the files and data on your web server offsite. When everything else fails a proper backup will save your bacon!
Benefits of a Proper Maintenance Plan
Skilled technicians keep you up to date on potential issues. You have worked together to put in place a maintenance plan that will keep your server healthy and reduce your chances of being hit by the most common problems. If something does go wrong a qualified technician is on call to assist you.
Our Approach?
Our team is highly knowledgeable with web server installation, configuration, virtual hosting, and maintenance on a variety of web server configurations including:
- Windows NT 4 / Internet Information Server 4
- Windows 2000 / Internet Information Server 5
- Windows NT 4 / IBM WebSphere
- Unix (Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux, etc.) Apache Web Server 1.3.20
- Unix Apache Add-ons and modifications including PHP, MOD_SSL, etc.
- Windows NT/2000 / Allaire Cold Fusion Server
Our staff can provide integrated database server configuration our staff can configure and maintain a variety of server configuration
and full web development services.
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