Ten reasons why you need to turn to sysdamine

Based on your personal experience of dealing with customers, all the problems that have arisen can be divided into three categories:

• Buying a server
• Initial server setup
• Subsequent operation

For each of the categories, there are times when the help of a sysadmin will have a very significant impact - will reduce errors, increase server performance or reduce latency. I identified nine reasons related to these categories, and a tenth to bonus, which does not fall into these categories.

1. You want to implement a non-standard task: Browser game, Scandinavian auction, multi-video conference, banner network and the like. The sysadmin will tell you which technologies are better to use and how to organize horizontal scaling of the project.
2. You want to purchase a server, but don’t know which one. Then the sysadmin will help you, choosing the most optimal from the available options, so that all server components are equally loaded, which eliminates the bottleneck problem.
3. You preobreli server, but don `t know which OS is better to install, how to partition the disk, whether it is worth doing RAID and what, whether LVM is needed and what type of file system is better. For example, the sysadmin will advise you not to use RAID-5 on 3 disks, but you probably did not know about it.
4. The server costs and needs its initial configuration. What is better - to install more recent software versions, with unknown errors or more stable, but with less functionality? How much to allocate resources for the web, and how much for the base? How to set up sending mail so that it is not marked as spam. The sysadmin will install everything, configure spf, domain keys, tell you what to put in reverse ptr and many more scary words that will make the server work more stable and productive.
5. It is necessary to conduct load testing of the server. As a whole, and every single part of it, in order to understand what is better to focus on - the speed of processing ajax or the problem of deadlocks when updating the database. Analyzing logs, sysamdin will give you a lot of valuable tips.
6. When you run the project, everything went wrong. The system is unstable and you need to understand what is happening. Which queries to the database slow down, the transfer of some POST data is “knocked out” by the script, why there is a delay between requests or a sudden connection gap. By turning on debug mode, the sysadmin can accumulate a wealth of valuable data for statistics, which will allow you to determine "which way to dig."
7. The project became suddenly very popular. The search engines do not go down from the server and they constantly index something. Or in the chat sits on a thousand people. Or ten new topics are created on the forums per second. What is better - to optimize the code, to buy more memory or fast drives? Or maybe it is generally time to change the server or take the second? Answers to all these questions will help find your sysadmin.
8. Where popularity - there are problems. High load can smoothly overrun in DDOS. And who can help here except your system administrator, who already knows how the project works, what server bottlenecks and how to ban a botnet?
9. You can try to hack through vulnerabilities in the software - xss, fill the image in the comments of which is executable php-code, upload and launch exploits. It is the sysadmin who will help protect the site from popular attacks, write down the IP of the attackers, their actions, and damn it, finally help to get to the attacker!
10. Bonus tip. You want to say thanks to your sysadmin again. For the fact that a year ago he set up a server that has worked without a problem all this time. It's so easy to say thank you. The work of system administrators is often forgotten, considering that the server works by itself. We are very pleased when we are remembered.