Server maintenance got you down?

One of the benefits of moving to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is getting out of the cycle of refreshing your hardware every 3 or so years. When you buy a server on your own, either for colocation space or data center, it’s like buying a car. The value begins to depreciate the moment you plug it in. You’ll pay for IT staff to maintain it over its entire lifespan, and If you’re lucky, it’ll last you at least 3 years.

Some IT teams aren’t so lucky. The server can reach the end-of-life much earlier for a variety of reasons. Hopefully you’ve planned for this outage and have a solid backup and recovery strategy (in which case, you’re probably paying a lot for redundancy as well), but you’re still responsible for replacing the hardware and getting your new server up and running.

Dedicated hardware changes the economic equation in a lot of ways, and the benefits of switching from a CapEx model to an OpEx model are well documented. But a lot of these arguments miss out on what it actually means to the customer from a performance standpoint. Sure, there is a cost benefit. But here are some of the other advantages to leaving the maintenance up to your IaaS provider:

• You get the best hardware. Most of us upgrade our phones when we reach the end of a contract, or when our device no longer works. Very few of us upgrade every year as new phones are released. How often would you upgrade if it was a service included in your phone plan?

Part of the promise of dedicated servers is that you no longer have to worry about whether you’re on the most current hardware. Your provider takes care of that for you, and it will usually be more frequent than you would refresh it yourself.

• If your server dies, it’s not your problem. If you’re running your own data center, or in a colocation space where you own the hardware, and a server dies, you need to replace it. That can be expensive, especially if the server was in the first year of its life. If you’re renting dedicated servers, the provider should ensure that your applications and data are safe, and swap servers or perform maintenance quickly to get you up and running.
• You’re outsourcing your data center staff. If you own your own data center, or you’re in a colocation space, you are responsible for having “boots on the ground” in case something goes wrong. In a dedicated hosting scenario, the cost of maintenance is baked into the monthly fee.

Most businesses, especially small ones with limited resources, can free up a lot of time, effort, and money by outsourcing the maintenance of their infrastructure. OVHcloud has been building and maintaining servers for nearly 20 years, and has automated its maintenance in order to provide customers with quick response to issues and peace of mind that whatever you’re hosting is secure in our data centers.

Take a look at our dedicated server options, or, if you’re virtualized on VMware™, our Hosted Private Cloud products.