Ten reasons why you should contact sysdamin

Based on my personal experience in communicating with customers, all the problems that have arisen can be divided into three categories:

• Server purchase
• Initial server setup
• Subsequent operation

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

1. You want to implement a non-standard task: a browser game, a Scandinavian auction, a multi-video conference, a banner network, and the like. The system administrator 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 you don’t know which one. Then the system administrator will help you, choosing the most optimal one from the available options, so that all server components are equally loaded, which eliminates the bottleneck problem.
3. You purchased the server, but you don’t know which OS is better to install, how to partition the disk, whether it is worth making RAID and which one, is LVM necessary and which type of file system is better to use. For example, the system administrator will advise against using RAID-5 on 3 disks, and you probably did not know about it.
4. The server stands and needs its initial configuration. Which is better - to install more recent versions of the software, 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 configure sending mail so that it is not marked as spam. The system administrator will install everything, configure spf, domain keys, say what to write in reverse ptr and many more scary words that will make the server work more stable and productive.
5. It is necessary to carry out load testing of the server. As a whole, as well as each of its separate parts, in order to understand what is better to focus on - the ajax processing speed or the deadlock problem when updating the database. By analyzing the logs, sysamdin will give you a lot of valuable advice.
6. When the project started, everything went wrong as expected. The system is unstable and you need to understand what exactly is happening. What requests to the database slow down, the transmission of what POST data “kicks” the script, why there is a delay between requests or a sudden disconnection. By enabling debugging mode, the system administrator can accumulate a lot of valuable data for statistics, which will allow you to determine "which way to dig."
7. The project suddenly became very popular. Search engines do not get off the server and constantly index something. Or thousands of people are chatting. Or the forums create ten new topics per second. Which is better - to optimize the code, buy more memory or faster disks? Or maybe it's time to change the server or take a second? Your system administrator will help you find answers to all these questions.
8. Where popularity is, there are problems. High load can smoothly outgrow in DDOS. And who can help here except your system administrator, who already knows thoroughly how the project works, what are the bottlenecks on the servers and how to ban a botnet?
9. You can be tried to crack through vulnerabilities in software - xss, the fill of the picture in the comments of which is the executable php-code, fill and run exploits. It is the system administrator who will help protect the site from popular attacks, record the IP of attackers, their actions, and hell, in the end, help to reach the attacker!
10. Bonus tip. You want to say thanks again to your system administrator. For the fact that he set up a server a year ago, which worked all this time without problems. It’s so easy to say “thank you”. The work of system administrators is often forgotten, believing that the server works on its own. We are very pleased when people remember us.