All Hands on Tech
Infotex maintains and supports more than 700 websites belonging to over 600 of our clients. We regard keeping these websites secure, stable and fast on our servers as being of equal importance to their original design and build.
So we thought we would share with you some insights to the sort of things we get up to behind the scenes. The bulk of the work is either carried out by, or under the direction of, our infrastructure manager John Harman, aka “Moz”, who has worked in Infotex since its inception 21 years ago(!).
We call this series “keeping the green lights on”, because Moz’s main aim is to avoid any amber or red lights coming on …. And if they do, he likes to be the first to know about it, so he can resolve issues quickly.
Our Ongoing Work
Daily Server Checks
All server loads are checked daily along with validating various health metrics such as disk/memory/processor usage and ensuring our backups are all running smoothly.
Routine Server Updating
At least once per week every server is checked to ensure that it has all the latest security updates installed.
Server Maintenance Windows
In addition to the above updating that is done during routine operating hours we also perform some out-of-hours work to update items which requires taking them offline briefly.
Server Replacements
We have recently added new servers to our fleet, this helps our capacity keep up with demand as well as allowing us to make incremental modernisation steps which will soon see us dispense with some old servers that are no longer capable of delivering what we need.
This Month
WordPress Updates
All WordPress sites have been/are in the process of being updated to the latest WordPress version and plugin versions. This is essential in ensuring that our client’s websites remain secure and performant.
For many WordPress clients, we added in some key Infotex baseline functionality for 2 features:
- Better password manager support so that the websites work well with password managers
- Secure cookies for improved protection when storing information within cookies.
CentOS 7/8 Upgrades
CentOS is a reliable and fast Linux operating system. We are continuing work to upgrade the operating system upon which most of our websites run, to ensure that they are fast, secure and continue to operate smoothly.
