Freedom: Server Administration
November 23, 2006 Posted by Tyler Cruz- Freedom: Server Administration
- ChatWebDev.com
- Affiliate Hip Hop
Freedom: Server Administration
I manage to just barely get by with two dedicated servers, both without CPanel. I’m able to issue basic commands, but for anything beyond my scope of knowledge I had always depended on my friend Zeeshan. I never particularly liked this for a few reasons.
For one, Zeeshan isn’t online as much as me and is often offline for long periods of time. If there was an emergency, I’d usually have to wait until he returned. Secondly, I wasn’t paying him most of the time, so that created a bit of conflict. Since I wasn’t paying him, it made it hard for me to justify demanding him to fix my server ASAP.
When Zeeshan wasn’t around, I’d resort to joining #apache or #linux channels on IRC desperately asking for help. This has saved me on several occassions, but sometimes there was simply nobody active in the channel.
My final resource was to hire an emergency server administration company, like Rack911. They were great the first two times, but then messed up my server on the 3rd time and ignored all my many e-mails and other methods of contact to fix what they messed up.
So, I decided to search for a new emergency server administration company to replace Rack911 for emergencies. What I found has been, so far, absolutely awesome.
I had posted on a number of forums, namely WebHostingTalk, for recommendations on such a company, and received a lot of responses. However, one company seemed to be recommended more than others. So I checked out their reputation from other posts and decided to try them out.
I was very hesitant at first to try them as their website was very amateurish, but I also know that most server administration sites seem to be; they aren’t webmasters but server administrators after all. Secondly, their prices seemed WAY too cheap, and so I was beginning to question their abilities, or lack thereof.
Long story short, I pre-paid for one year. I basically get 24/7 assistance, including emergencies. Theres a bunch of people who work at the company since it’s been doing so well, and part of what made me try them out was how fast they responded to me; literally 10-12 seconds after I had sent them an inquiry e-mail, they had responded (not automated) and added me to MSN. Scary!
The owner is on MSN pretty much constantly, and even gave me his personal cell number for emergencies; so if my server goes down I can wake him up or whatever. I’ve already had them fix three issues on my server, and they’ve responded quick and great. There’s been basically no wait time on my support tickets. And their support ticket system is great – once you issue a ticket, they then respond and it is e-mailed to you instantly. You can then simply reply back in the e-mail and that’s the same as updating the ticket on their website.
They also gave me a nice discount since I offered to prepay for a year.
Now, I’ve only been with them for a few days so perhaps my dispostion will change in the future, but so far I’m extremely pleased.
ChatWebDev.com
The following is a paid plug, however I’m personally writing it since I actually go there myself.
ChatWebDev.com is a chatroom for webmasters. You can chat online using a web client on the site, or connect directly via IRC. I’d definitely recommend the latter, and you can download an IRC client such as mIRC.
If you already have mIRC, you can connect to the chatroom right now by clicking here.
There’s usually 10-12 people online at any given time and most are young web entrepreneurs (17-20ish). Discussion ranges from everything to SEO, AdSense, Industry News, Gossip, Prison Break and Lost discussion…
Anyhow, it’s a good place to chat.
Affiliate Hip Hop
Tyler be a Gangsta Yo!
trigatch4 made a funny rap song (are they called songs? or just rap?) about affiliating and being a webmaster. You can listen to it and read the lyrics at his blog here. I give him props for coming up with a unique way to get some attention and backlinks to his blog.
I’m mentioned in the song near the very end (about 4:12 or so), lol.
That’s right.
Anyhow, that’s all for now.
Good luck and good earnings 🙂
3 Responses to “Freedom: Server Administration”
soo what’s the company??? Why no mention of it? URL?
I had good experiences with Rack911.com. What happened that they messed up your server? Does the new provider (who is that anyway) provide you with monitoring and that stuff, too? Or is it just plain server administration?
Christoph
Tyler,
can you tell us the url of the company you used?