Blog
Choosing between a commercial all-in-one monitor and an open-source metrics stack is less about licence fees and more about who will run the system day to day. A five-dimension comparison with three concrete SME scenarios — and why Grafana is not the thing you compare PRTG against.
"It still works" is not a safety statement. From expired vendor support to a rising failure rate, seven signs that a server refresh has stopped being optional — and a repair-or-replace framework for the decision.
"We are fifty people — which server do we need?" is the wrong question. Capacity follows workloads, not headcount. The variables that actually size a server, and the checklist to bring to any purchasing conversation.
An hour of server downtime is never just the repair invoice: idle payroll, stalled sales and shaken customer trust land on the same bill. A plain framework to price downtime for your own business — no inflated industry statistics.
Before comparing server brands and prices, settle the architecture question: will your workloads live on bare metal or in a virtual layer? A management-level decision guide built on workload type, recovery needs and licensing.
A 15-step Linux hardening checklist for SMEs — SSH security, firewall, user management, logging, and regular updates.
Strategies to bring an SME cloud bill down — cost control in Azure and AWS, cleaning up idle resources, and reserved-capacity decisions.
An annual Active Directory health check — replication, FSMO roles, GPO, user/group audit, schema health, and an SME maintenance checklist.
iSCSI and SAN basics — centralised storage architecture, performance evaluation, and cost analysis for the SME server room.
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