Server management services for teams without a sysadmin.
Server management is everything that keeps a machine healthy once your application is running on it: patching, firewalling, monitoring, backups, certificates, and someone who investigates when a graph changes shape. On your VPS or your AWS account, ₹7,999 / $119 per server a month, with two hours of ops work included.
What we manage, and what we do not
The second list is as useful as the first, and it is shorter to read than a discovery call.
Cloud VPS
DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Linode and Akamai. The bulk of what we run, and the right home for most applications.
AWS
EC2 and Lightsail, with S3, CloudFront and RDS where the application needs them.
Bare-metal Linux
Ubuntu and Debian primarily, and we will work on RHEL derivatives where that is what you have.
Control panels
RunCloud, Cloudways, CyberPanel and Plesk — managed as they are rather than replaced because we prefer something else.
What this is not
- Windows Server, and the Microsoft database and tooling stack around it
- Kubernetes clusters — we will run the machines under one, not the orchestration
- On-premises hardware, racking, cabling or anything that needs somebody in a building
People search for all three of those using the same words, so it is worth saying plainly rather than finding out in minute thirty of a call.
₹7,999 / $119 per server, per month
Seven things, six of which you should never notice and one of which is the two hours a month you can spend however you like.
- OS and package patching
- On a monthly cycle, with security and kernel updates applied out of band when severity calls for it rather than waiting for the window.
- Firewall and SSH hardening
- UFW or security groups configured deliberately, key-only authentication, root login disabled, and fail2ban in front of what remains exposed.
- Certificate lifecycle
- Issued, renewed and watched. An expired certificate should never be something a customer tells you about.
- Monitoring and alerting
- Uptime, CPU, memory, disk and load, with alerts routed to us as well as to you.
- Log rotation and disk watch
- The single most common cause of a server that stops for no visible reason is a full disk, and it is entirely preventable.
- Nightly off-site backups
- Stored away from the machine, with restores tested rather than assumed.
- Two hours of ops work
- Deployments, configuration changes, scaling, investigations. Beyond that, ₹1,500 / $25 an hour, quoted and approved first.
AWS specifically
EC2 and Lightsail sizing and right-sizing, S3 as a backup target, CloudFront in front, the basics of RDS, and IAM hygiene — which is usually the thing nobody has looked at since the account was opened. A monthly cost review comes with it, because on AWS the bill is a performance metric.
Honest scope: we manage small and mid-sized estates well. If you need a multi-account landing zone with an organisation-wide control tower, that is a different kind of firm and we will say so.
When something breaks
Alerts reach us and you at the same time, so you are never in the position of reporting your own outage. From there it is triage, a written cause, and a fix — with the work coming out of your included ops hours unless it is large enough to need a quote first, in which case you get one before we start.
Response times follow your plan and the service level agreement. We do not advertise a faster number than the one we commit to there.
Server management or managed hosting?
They get confused constantly, and buying the wrong one is expensive in opposite directions.
You have one or two WordPress sites
Buy managed hosting at ₹1,499 / $24 a site. The machine is ours, we size it, and you never think about a server again. Paying ₹7,999 to manage a box you did not need to own is the most common mistake here.
You have an application, or a server you already own
Buy this. A custom application, a database that has to stay in a particular country, an existing AWS account, or anything that needs decisions made about the machine rather than around it.
Server questions, answered
What is server management?
Everything that keeps a server healthy once an application is running on it: applying operating-system and package updates, configuring the firewall and access, watching CPU, memory and disk, holding backups off the machine, renewing certificates, and being the person who investigates when something changes. It is not the same as hosting — hosting is renting the machine, management is running it.
What do server managers actually do?
Most of it is preventative and invisible: patching on a schedule, rotating logs before the disk fills, checking that a backup would actually restore, tightening access when somebody leaves. The visible half is incidents and changes — a deployment, a scaling decision, a service that stopped at three in the morning.
What is the best software for managing servers?
For a small estate, a control panel like RunCloud or Cloudways plus a monitoring service covers most of it, and that combination is what we run for many clients. The tooling is rarely the limiting factor though. What is missing in most situations is somebody whose job it is to look at the alerts.
Do you need root access?
Yes, on a named account with key-based authentication rather than a shared password. We can work through a bastion or a VPN if your setup requires it, and we will document exactly what we changed. If root is not something you are willing to hand over, managed hosting where we own the machine is a better fit.
Can you work alongside our developers?
That is the usual arrangement. Your team owns the application and ships it; we own the machine it runs on and the pipeline that gets it there. It works best when the boundary is written down at the start, so we do that in the first week rather than discovering it during an incident.
What if the server is already broken?
We take it on and fix it, but we scope that separately from the monthly plan — an inherited server in an unknown state can be an afternoon or a week. We look first, tell you what we found and what it will cost to get to a stable baseline, and only then start the plan.
Tell us what you are running
How many servers, where they are, and what is on them. This is a consultative sale rather than a checkout — a short call is usually faster than a form, and it is where we tell you if managed hosting would serve you better.