How a New Server is Like a New Home

My family moved last month, upgrading from an old house with one bathroom, to a house that had been recently restored with (gasp) three bathrooms. It was a wise upgrade, especially because we have a 12-year old girl, getting ready to start Middle School. In addition to the extra baths, I was astonished by how nice it was to have new windows, lighting, cabinets, more efficient heating and cooling systems, a full-sized garage, a master bedroom with vaulted ceiling and a walkout balcony. I loved my old house, but we had definitely outgrown it.

It reminded me of the many server upgrades, moves, and migrations we perform here at Sundog Media, not to mention the ongoing maintenance we provide for your site’s “home.”

Old home
The Old House – Great Bones and Character. Extra sturdy.
New home
The New House. Not too far off from the old one structurally. But beautiful, with lots of fancy features and flourishes.

If we “move” your site, it’s almost certainly for security, stability, and increased performance, much like our new, awesome house. In 2015, when a data center experienced downtime due to attacks on their infrastructure, we moved to new servers for extra security and stability. We moved to upgrade to Google Cloud servers earlier this year. And we recently started moving certain sites to PHP7-capable servers, which removes potential bottlenecks, allowing for better server stability. Kinda like those additional bathrooms.

Moving servers can be challenging, requiring transferring files, updating security certificates, and updating Domain Name Server pointers. Thankfully, much of this is automated. Hooray for automation! However, we also need to update your site’s address. This is not automated, so we’ll be asking for your help, unless you’re on our Domain Gold program, in which case, we take care of the heavy lifting.

After the move, ongoing maintenance and monitoring are critical to ensuring those new systems are humming. We monitor server uptime, check load times, and scan for potential delays. Like a good alarm system, we scan sites daily for malware. We’re also exploring ways to monitor your site’s speed and performance continuously. More on that will come in a future post.

Here at Sundog, we keep your sites and servers monitored, maintained, and updated daily. If we’ve outgrown a system, or see a technology worth taking advantage of, we’re probably going to move you to the latest greatest service available. Your site will love its new home, as much as we love ours.