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Servers that stay up, patched, and provably recoverable.
Provisioning, hardening and daily operation of Linux and Windows Server environments — physical, virtual or containerized.
Server management is the discipline of keeping compute reliable, current and recoverable.
Three things separate a managed server from an unmanaged one: it is configured to a known baseline, it is patched on a defined cycle, and its backups have been restored — not merely scheduled. Most environments we inherit fail on the third.
We treat the baseline as the product. A server built from a documented, repeatable configuration can be rebuilt in an hour. A server built by hand, over years, by people who have left, cannot.
What we actually do, in the order it matters.
- Provisioning
- Build from documented baselines. Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL/Rocky, and Windows Server. Configuration captured in Ansible so a rebuild is repeatable, not archaeological.
- Hardening
- Secure configuration against CIS Benchmarks: unnecessary services removed, SSH and RDP locked down, host firewalls, disk encryption, audit logging enabled.
- Patch management
- Defined cadence with maintenance windows. Security patches tracked separately from feature updates. Staged: test, then production.
- Virtualization
- Proxmox VE, VMware vSphere, Hyper-V. Resource planning, snapshots, host redundancy.
- Containers
- Docker and Kubernetes: image hygiene, registry management, resource limits, rollout and rollback strategy.
- Databases
- PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, MSSQL. Tuning, replication, and backups verified by restore.
- Monitoring
- Prometheus and Grafana, or Zabbix. Alerts tied to symptoms a human should act on — not noise nobody reads.
- Backup & recovery
- 3-2-1: three copies, two media, one off-site. Restores tested on a schedule and documented, with a stated RPO and RTO.
The stack we run day to day.
How many servers, and who touches them today?
Tell us the environment and we will tell you what we would fix first — and what we would leave alone.
Contact us- info@bstedge.com
- Response
- Within one business day
- Engagement
- Project, managed retainer, or advisory