Your website and email, watched over. And if something breaks, I’m the first to know.
The story of a move: websites and email leaving shared hosting for a dedicated server, without the client having to lift a finger, plus a monitoring system that alerts on everything.
A server move nobody noticed
The challenge
The websites and email lived on shared hosting (one server split between lots of clients you know nothing about). It was time to move to a dedicated server without cutting off email or making anyone set up their phone or computer again.
What we did
- Moved the websites and email to a dedicated server, keeping the same passwords: the client didn’t have to touch their email.
- Moved the DNS (the address book that tells the internet where each website and mailbox lives) to Cloudflare.
- Automatic attack blocking, with Telegram alerts that tell a suspicious login from the client themselves, in Spain, apart from an attack from abroad.
- Nightly backups to storage at home, with daily snapshots kept for 14 days: you can go back to any day in the last two weeks.
- 23 websites monitored from the outside, just as any visitor would see them.
- The website forms are tested end to end every morning, with an alert if any of them fails.
- A watchdog that raises the alarm when another watchdog stops working.
Three wrong email passwords. Could it be the client? Blocked for now.
Repeated attempts from outside Spain. Simply blocked.
Finished. Snapshot saved.
Tested this morning: all arriving.
Mock-up with sample data.
Monitored websites 23 up
Mock-up with sample data.
The result
Monitoring is useless if nobody finds out. That’s why everything sends an alert.
A watchdog that fails silently is worse than none at all, because it gives you a false sense of security. So every piece raises the alarm when something goes wrong, and there’s another watchdog keeping an eye on the watchdogs.
Sound familiar?
If you don’t know where your website lives, who does the backups or what would happen if it stopped working tomorrow, tell me about it. We’ll go through it together.