Web and Mobile Application Development

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 :

  1. Introduced backup jobs
  2. Improved server performance and reliability (through elimination of a VM bug/Linux kernel issue)
  3. 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 :
  1. Linux server support
  2. Exim support
  3. 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 :

  1. Added an automated cron job to alert us of updates, and to install security updates automatically
  2. Added an automated backup job for MySQL and the system configuration files
  3. Introduced Varnish and various WordPress caching plugins to reduce server load, allowing the server to better handle bursts of traffic
  4. Migrated some MySQL tables to InnoDB to remove locking which had become a problem when posts were being authored/written
  5. 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)
  6. Added the server onto our Nagios monitoring setup, which checks disk/load/http availability