How to Find a Good Web Server Admin & How Much Should They Cost?

Ldeathofaase on 02/03/2016 - 22:59

Hi all

Since this site seems to have a lot of really tech savvy people on it who don't like wasting cash, I was wondering if anyone could share some tips on how to find a good freelance/on-demand web server admin?!

Obviously offering buckets of cash might attract someone talented (duh) but surely there are people here who have hired or worked with server admins previously and may be willing to share what to look out for and what would constitute a good deal?

In terms of basic skills needed we're talking Linux/Apache/MySQL and the kind of skills that might come in handy to maintain high availability/low site load times for a blog style site with about 66,000 unique visitors a month.

PS Long time lurker/first time poster. So please go easy if I've accidentally left out any important info.

Thanks =)

Internet

Comments

  • scotty on 02/03/2016 - 23:14

    OzBargainer's method:

    A more sensible approach is probably looking for managed high available WordPress hosting. You pay a bit more than your regular shared hosting, but you don't need to worry about learning all the sysadmin stuff or hiring a contractor.

    • deathofaase on 02/03/2016 - 23:39

      Thanks for the suggestions Scotty.

      Unfortunately I'm too busy and not talented enough to learn how to do it well.

      Managed hosting is mildly appealing. But I'm worried about all the bad reviews I see online about users getting palmed between techs continuously and with limited custom support for unique requirements I.e. they support a particular type of roll out and if you don't use their out of the box solution, you're back to square one with finding support. Did you know of any company that does managed hosting without these pitfalls? And without it being mindblowingly expensive..up to $1000p/m is okay. Multiples of that is overkill in my mind

      • dylanando on 02/03/2016 - 23:42

        WPEngine is a nice one, However expensive and with the AUD only going down, This can get quite costly.

        • deathofaase on 03/03/2016 - 00:16

          Thanks dylanlando. I'd not even heard of or thought of WPengine.

          We're running WP and that seems to be their forte.

          Do you have any experience using them for Australian traffic? On my calcs we'd be at their 1 million visits per month range of plans. Which they don't quote pricing for upfront.

        • noyesmaybeok on 03/03/2016 - 00:20

          "66,000 unique visitors a month."

          That's a fair whack short of a million, you'd be on their lower plans. They track visitors, so for example if they visit 3 pages each that's 180,000 "visits", however that's only tracked at 60,000 visits.

          Being in the US they're not the quickest for AU visitors. Is the majority of your traffic Australian? If so something local is the best bet.

          What's the URL of your site? Depending if it's cached or not (logged in users vs none) and on-site comments or something like disqus the overall loading could be made quite light; it's well short of needing multiple servers with load balancing or anything more involved like that.

        • deathofaase on 03/03/2016 - 00:36

          @rochow: they say "1 MILLION + VISITS/MO." for Premium at WPengine..not visitors. Also, 66,000 uniques easily do 1mil "visits" in a month from the stats I've been monitoring - and multiple million hits in a month.

          prefer not to discuss the actual site given it's a commercial site and knowing my luck this post on ozbargain will probably be the first thing a person sees when they search the company =)

          it's mostly cached. not a lot of logged in users as a percent of total. I guess an understanding of caching is therefore something high on the list of desirables for the server admin. Perhaps memcache, memcached & fragment caching?

          But what should I be expecting to pay for someone who knows all of this stuff?

          Is the consensus that this is really low level sophistication for your standard web server admin?

          EDIT: site is local (.au) site to answer your earlier question.

        • dylanando on 03/03/2016 - 00:53

          @deathofaase: I have been with them, Got to the point where I was spending more on hosting than i was making. Was getting few million visits/pm however my site was blazingly fast and their support is above exceptional. If you can afford it defiantly go for it. Pretty sure they do a free month trial to!

        • noyesmaybeok on 03/03/2016 - 01:02
          +1

          @deathofaase: If you read the tooltip on the plans, 1 visit = 1 unique IP address in 1 day. So for example 100 IP's visiting 50 pages each = 100 visits, not 5000 by their count.

          Hits = files. For example let's say your website has 100 items on a page: styles, scripts, images etc. So 1 page load (visit) = 100 hits. 10 page views = 1000 hits.
          There's a lot more hits then there are visits. And a lot less visits than WP engine counts as 'visits' (it's more, unique visitors, than visits/page views).

          Based on what you've said a ready-made hosting plan with a developer who's optimised the site will be enough. There isn't a need to get involved in dedicated servers with sysadmins - that's a headache you'd rather avoid!

          Generally speaking you'd be better spending money upfront optimising the site as good as it can be then use a general hosting solution. The devil is in the details, even down to time of day - for example 2000 visitors spread nicely over the day is different to 20 visitors an hour with 400/hr at peak times.

          Feel free to PM the site and I can take a look. $1000/month is more than enough though based on the 60k/month visitor figure; would be best to break it down into initial benchmarking & improvement, hosting, and even SEO ($1000/month on SEO will be a lot better return than $1000/month on hosting).

  • [Deactivated] on 03/03/2016 - 00:40

    Run it on Azure, turn on some auto scaling, easy.

    • deathofaase on 03/03/2016 - 00:44

      Thanks Drew22. You'll laugh but I am literally too stupid to know how to do this. I understand how to maintain the site install i.e. the wordpress backend. I have no idea how to migrate our current install to an azure instance. Also, isn't Azure for .net? Again, I may be super dumb here. So bear with me.

      • [Deactivated] on 03/03/2016 - 00:54

        Send me some details and I can see what it may take.

        Running as a service would relegate the need to maintain the underlying OSs and servers.

      • cretin on 03/03/2016 - 01:06

        Azure hosting is essentially microsoft servers in the cloud. Since wordpress is PHP it will do just fine. Same with AWS (uses linux). These are pretty simple to setup and maintenance I assume would be pretty minimal. Do you have a friend/nephew (or niece) who is decent with computers? Perhaps you can offer them some money to get you setup. It's really not that difficult to get EC2 instances up and these scale on demand and you only pay for the CPU time you use, its pretty awesome stuff.

        Have a look through this guide, it shows you how to install wp on aws (you mentioned above you know how to do this), just demonstrates that its not as scary/difficult as it may appear to be:
        http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/hosting-w…

        And have a look here for migration:
        http://www.tecsolsoftware.com/blog/migrate-wordpress-website…

        All simple stuff really. There's plenty of stigma around IT work by non-technical folk, but I think this was primarily created to keep the IT people employed. Just put in a bit of time and you can get the basics going, plenty of resources on the net.

        • noyesmaybeok on 03/03/2016 - 01:14

          RE: platforms, azure is awful for the fact no-one uses it.

          Take computers for an example. Standard wise: Windows > Mac > Linux (every hundred versions of it)

          The chance of you finding someone who knows the version of Linux you're using, is familiar with it & can fix it quickly is slim to none. Alternatively you use Windows, and every IT guy even most newbies can help you. Unless there's drastic performance advantages you'll always be better using something 'industry standard'. I could find 10 guys in 10 mins that have used WPengine (just for an example), no-one that knows Azure, most won't even have heard of it. It's got extremely low penetration in the market. It doesn't mean it's bad, it just means you're restricting yourself to a small set of people who can help you. WordPress isn't super amazing beyond others or anything, but you can't throw a stone without hitting someone who knows it, so it's great at having an easy to use, easy to support website. That's a benefit WP has over other CMS's even if in a particular instance others would be a bit faster or whatever.

  • mskeggs on 03/03/2016 - 07:41
    +1

    Please don't take this the wrong way, but you don't know enough to know what you don't know.
    This means options like "run it on Azure" are not valid because you lack the knowledge to evaluate the solution, and 3 months after it is up and running and you want to add some plugin that is a bit left field you will be stuck without any direction.

    You could easily employ a qualified sysadmin for 8 hours per month to admin your site. I would suggest freelancer.com or similar. You should draw up a job description which includes things like:

    • apply security updates for OS, application software and Wordpress including extensions
    • monitor the system for any security incidents and take remedial action
    • monitor site performance and recommend and enact any improvements
    • resolve any software dependencies or incompatibilities to allow optimum functioning of Wordpress environment
    • etc. etc.

    Stating what you need in plain English allows the admin to do what they do best and run the site. It would be reasonable to either pay the admin for extra time at the beginning to bring everything up to scratch and develop some automation scripts etc. to make the on-going work easy, or accept that it will take a few months to get to the fully maintained stage.

    This approach is not what I would recommend, however.

    I think you would do best to find a host that specialises in WP installations. WPengine was mentioned, I know dreamhost has an offering, and I expect there are many more. List all the extensions/plug-ins and any other software your site uses (do you have discussion forums, as well as a blog, for example, or might you want this in future?) and approach the sales team at a number of these specialist hosts.

    Ask them if they currently support all the software on your list. Ask them what their policy is for version updates. Ask them how they ensure a fast service. Mention you are in AU and ask if they use any distribution networks like Akamai. Find out if they can assist installing software you might need in future, or if there is a list of 'one click' supported software. Tell them your current traffic (hits, but also disk space used and bandwidth transferred) and projected growth and ask for a price. Ask if they will assist to transfer your site to their hosting. Ask if they will assist transfer you away again if you have to leave for whatever reason.

    Now evaluate the responses against the costs and select your best option.

    You will find this level of service is costlier than a shared hosting plan, but cheaper than employing your own sysadmin. Consider the risk/benefit as well. Is your site growing, so that it will have increasing revenues? Or is it an adjunct to an off-line business maybe? What would be the damage if it got hacked and all registered users details were taken/spammed? These are the kind of things you need to consider in addition to costs and ease-of-management.

    • scotty on 03/03/2016 - 08:44
      +1

      This. Saying "putting it on Azure/AWS and it will just scale" is totally irresponsible. Those are containers which you need to manage yourself. Adding Azure or AWS's infrastructure is making this more complicated than necessary.

      At 66k visits per month it's not even high traffic, which makes high availability more important than scalability, as a single low end VPS would be sufficient to handle the load. However as @mskeggs has suggested, look for managed WordPress hosts that can take care all the software upgrades and security patches for you. WPengine is expensive however there are many cheaper alternatives. DreamHost has WordPress housing as a separated product. MediaTemple as well. I wouldn't hire a random somebody off freelancer to do the admin for me.

      • [Deactivated] on 03/03/2016 - 09:29

        Why would anyone want to manage the OS layer?

        The OP admitted to not being technical, yet you want them to have to manage patching and God knows what else?

        Focus on the application and not the infrastructure running it, platform as a service is the way to go here.

        • scotty on 03/03/2016 - 20:25

          Sorry you have misread my comment. I did say

          as @mskeggs has suggested, look for managed WordPress hosts that can take care all the software upgrades and security patches for you.

          Shared hosting that specialised in HA/High performance WordPress. No sysadmin, no freelancer techie.

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