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When Do You Need to Get a Remote Reboot Option For Your Server
It’s 2 a.m. The unthinkable is having your site or server go down. You can’t log into your dedicated server’s control, and you have no way to find out what’s wrong with your server. So what you do? Before you break out the alcohol and go screaming into the night? Frantically, put in a call to technical support that is closed for the day? Well, let me offer two other courses of action that you can take.
The first thing that you will want to do is contact your web hosting company if it has 24 hour technical support. If you can get to their technical support department, tell them what’s happened. If you can’t get them on the line, hopefully you have a Plan B in the form of a remote restart application resident on your server. If you have a remote boot option installed, you can easily reboot your own server. While doing a remote reboot may not solve every problem that you’re having, it does certainly help in a number of issues that can occur on a server.
So, what does it mean by having a remote reboot?
On the Windows and UNIX platforms, there is a capability where you can remotely reboot your server. It’s dependent upon the type of reboot, your web hosting company allows, but you may be able to simply type in your IP address and perform the reboot through your browser. There may also be a control panel help interface on your computer where you can perform that same reboot locally.
If you can do the first option, which is browser-based reboot, it usually requires that you have your username and password that was supplied by the hosting company when you first setup your server. You’ll also need the IP address up your remote reboot location.
All you have to do is put in your IP address, and your browser should take you to your remote reboot location. If you’re using a locally based control panel, it follows the same basic principles. What you need to do is select the server that you want to reboot, enter in any required information like user name and password, and hit the execute button. Once you finish this process, you should have a server that’s rebooting.
Your location should be secure, in order to prevent hackers from gaining access to your servers reboot information. If an authorized person gains access to your remote rebooting information, it would be very easy for them to destroy your server.
You may be asking yourself why your server needs to go through a rebooting process from time to time. Just like normal computer, sometimes applications can freeze up or lock causing a server crash. It can have one of the processes not complete its run as planned which can also freeze the system. All of this can usually be fixed by a server reboot. Believe it or not, this is very similar to restarting your computer when it locks up and freezes. A remote reboot is necessary because you can’t reach through your computer screen, and start a server which is located geographically in another location. So, a remote reboot allows you to literally push that restart button on your server.
This option should only be used when absolutely necessary, after you’ve exhausted all other methods to get your server back online. Moving to the rebooting process, will cause everything to be shut down and the server to be restarted. This may take a period of time for everything to come back online. So, be forewarned.
Having a remote reboot application can be a whole lot safer, and cut down the amount of times you need to call technical support at your hosting company. In some instances, hosting companies don’t offer 24-hour technical support anyway, so instead of having to wait until the next day in order to get help, through a remote reboot, you can actually fix the problem yourself.
