Outsourced Support – Server administration
Posted by Abdul Vasi on 06 Jun 2009 at 12:53 am | Tagged as: Hosting
1) Outsourcing Support
Outsourced support as we are aware is a blessing in disguise for the small business owners. All we need is spend some days explaining the new team our way of working & responding to the tickets and the outsourced team does it relentlessly. I’ve written earlier explaining “per per ticket” solution which is good for starters but doesn’t include Level 3 administrative jobs.
2) Server Administration / Management
Server, VPS maintenance and management is an essential job for a hosting company. If you have an unmanaged server, it is a good idea to sign up for a server management company for securing and managing the servers. Having a Server management company monitoring and managing your servers allows the hosting company owner to concentrate more on sales, promotions.
Let’s face it, You cannot be working 24 hours a day and a server has to be monitored continuously for load, email spammers, service failure etc. Having a management company watching the servers 24/7 for the technical stuff at least allows the hosting companies owner sleep peacefully.
Assuming that you do not have a management company monitoring your servers, there are a few things which could happen with the server. Any of the services could fail affecting the server performance. Spammers would have spammed millions of emails by compromising your server even before you could realize or worse still, the server could be down for one of these reasons.
3) Administration Tasks
Server management companies’ jobs include server monitoring at regular intervals, server software support and upgrades, system security, optimization and hardening etc. Servers’ managements companies are reachable mostly via helpdesk, email and if local are available on phone too. Nowadays, Most of the Companies representatives are available on instant messengers too round the clock.
Majority of the management companies assign dedicated hours for their clients. The number of hours covered monthly could be anywhere between 10-25 hours of administrative job.
4) Administration Pricing
Server Management pricing varies from as low as 20$ a month to as high as 200$ monthly per server. Windows server management could be on the expensive side. Large number of servers to be managed allows you to negotiate on the pricing with the management company. Consider this, if you recruit an in-house administrator, he could only work 8 hours and the salary could be expensive than the amount charged by the management companies. For the price of 1 in-house admin, you could have an outsourced management company watch your server 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
