Examples of our work
RedFern Media
RedFern approached us in mid-2012; they have no internal expertise in Linux administration and needed assistance with a Linux server they have hosted with 1and1. We’ve :
- Introduced backup jobs
- Improved server performance and reliability (through elimination of a VM bug/Linux kernel issue)
- Added monitoring of the server, so we can alert them if it goes offline.
AXLR8
Axlr8 have been a customer for a number of years, we provide :
- Linux server support
- Exim support
- Support for a custom mail archiving solution they have (Cassandra, Exim, Python, PHP)
Anorak.co.uk
The anorak.co.uk site has a relatively high level of traffic (averaging ~100 requests/second) and is hosted from a single Linux server.
When we took over administration of the server, we found that :
- Server updates weren’t being performed
- There was no backup
- The server was heavily loaded, and as a result page load times were slow.
- The server would often become unstable, or crash, during periods of high traffic
- There was no active monitoring of the site/server’s availability.
We therefore :
- Added an automated cron job to alert us of updates, and to install security updates automatically
- Added an automated backup job for MySQL and the system configuration files
- Introduced Varnish and various WordPress caching plugins to reduce server load, allowing the server to better handle bursts of traffic
- Migrated some MySQL tables to InnoDB to remove locking which had become a problem when posts were being authored/written
- Monitored MySQL and it’s performance; undertook performance tuning of MySQL and improved the queries which were being run (e.g. through creation / addition of indexes on tables or improving caching repetitive, expensive queries)
- Added the server onto our Nagios monitoring setup, which checks disk/load/http availability