Dedicated Server Management

Choose dedicated when you have genuine single-tenant performance requirements at high resource levels, regulatory or contractual requirements that mandate dedicated hardware, workloads with consistently high resource consumption that make cloud per-hour pricing more expensive than dedicated capacity, or specific hardware requirements (GPUs, high-RAM, particular CPU architectures) that VPS providers don't offer. For most growing businesses, a well-tuned VPS delivers comparable performance at a fraction of the cost — we'll tell you honestly during scoping if dedicated isn't justified.

Linux is our deepest specialism — Ubuntu LTS, Debian, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, RHEL, and CentOS (where it's still in use). Windows Server is supported for environments that genuinely require it (IIS, .NET Framework, specific Microsoft stack integrations). We work with custom configurations and control panels (cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin) where the existing setup uses them, but we typically prefer raw OS management for production reliability.

Yes — both. Regular OS and software patching is applied on agreed cadence (typically monthly for non-critical, immediate for security-critical), with maintenance windows scheduled in advance for reboots. CVE-driven emergency patches are applied within agreed response SLAs when security issues are disclosed — not when you happen to read about them. We subscribe to vulnerability feeds for the packages installed on your servers so disclosure response is proactive rather than reactive.

Yes. We monitor CPU utilisation, memory pressure, disk I/O and free space, network throughput, RAID status (where applicable), drive SMART metrics, and temperature where the hardware exposes it. Alerts route to engineers when metrics drift toward concerning thresholds — so hardware issues are caught early rather than discovered when a drive fails completely.

Yes — on active management retainers. Response times are agreed in the SLA, typically within 15 minutes for production-down incidents and 1 hour for severe-degradation incidents. Documented runbooks make incident response predictable rather than improvised. We are explicit about what 'response' means versus 'resolution' — response is engineer engagement; resolution timeline depends on the incident itself.

Yes. Server migrations are routine — provider-to-provider migrations, hardware upgrades, OS major-version migrations, and physical-to-cloud lift-and-shifts. We plan migrations with staged cut-over, DNS handling, SSL transfer, and rollback paths that stay open until success criteria are met. See also our data migration and API sync service for migration-specific projects.

Yes. Multi-server clusters with load balancers (Nginx, HAProxy, AWS ALB), database replication and failover (PostgreSQL streaming replication, MySQL Group Replication, MongoDB replica sets), and shared storage (NFS, Ceph, GlusterFS) configurations are supported. For genuinely complex distributed setups, we coordinate with our cloud hosting solutions team where managed cloud services often deliver better operational characteristics.

Automated daily backups by default, hourly or more frequent where Recovery Point Objectives demand it. Backups stored off-site (not on the same server) with retention windows scaled to your requirements. Point-in-time recovery configured for production databases. Most importantly, restoration is tested by restoring backups into a staging environment as part of onboarding — so backups are known to work rather than assumed to.

Yes. Audit-led optimisation projects are common — we audit current state, document the gaps, and propose a prioritised remediation plan. Performance tuning typically yields meaningful improvements on servers that have been running for years without sustained attention, particularly on the web stack and database layers. Audits available as a one-off engagement or as the entry point to ongoing management.