Inside Crew

Most web hosting companies carry out periodic maintenance on their servers to ensure optimum performance. It usually carried out on weekends when traffic to most websites is less, to minimize the inconvenience caused to customers.

Usually server maintenance involves taking backup of data, deleting unwanted files which have been created. A daily or weekly backup of data is take and stored in a location which is at a distance from the server.

New versions of the Server OS and application software are frequently released and these upgrades are carried out during server maintenance . The server is usually off line for a short time, usually less than twenty minutes.

The server Operating System (OS) used depends to a large extent on the skills of the system administrator and budget available. If the system is stable and does not give any error, the system administrator may hesitate to upgrade it to an updated version of the OS.

Some of the Operating system used for servers are:
1. Windows NT : released in  1993 by Microsoft, it was supposed to be a processor-independent  multiuser operating system with features comparable to Unix

2. Windows 2000 Server

3. Windows 2003 Server - it is scalable and designed for use in business servers. Reboots may be needed every time a new upgrade / patch is applied. The Volume Shadow feature is useful

4. Linux : Linux is widely used as an operating system for web hosting servers, since it is cheaper and more stable with little downtime. Compared to Windows based OS, Linux can be used  for more types of computer hardware including desktop computers, supercomputers, mainframes, and embedded devices (with microphones) such as cellphones. For the same performance, Linux OS requires less hardware compared to Windows OS

5. FreeBSD : also used in Web hosting servers. Compared to Linux, it is easier to set up, manage and upgrade to the latest version. Significantly cheaper than Windows OS

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