Customer cases / Subscription management
Ilge Subscription Management transferred the management of its servers to Servermeister, after the same system administrator had done so for fourteen years. Within ten weeks, we took over three servers, set up fixed maintenance windows and solved the first failures at the source instead of with additional hardware.
to take over three servers and fourteen years of knowledge
system drive usage, without buying additional storage
downtime during the takeover: the portal continued to operate as usual
Ilge Subscription Management manages magazine subscriptions for companies and also sells books through its own websites. The Amsterdam family business works with its own customer portal and is building a new version of it with its own development team, including a search function over the entire book catalogue.
The environment consists of a production server with more than 1 TB of data storage, a separate backup server and a development server. Ilge is ISO 27001 certified, so management, access and agreements with suppliers must be demonstrably in order.
Fourteen years of knowledge were with one person, and he handed over the management. The previous manager carefully arranged the transfer, but such a switch always exposes what has not been recorded anywhere.
We take over, together with your previous manager and without downtime.
Get quoteWe took over the management in steps, together with the previous manager and the Ilge team.
Our administrators log in with private keys; passwords remain in Ilge’s vault.
Ilge added us to the hosting and the DNS provider. Ilge remains the owner, we manage.
Status emails from the servers come to us, and our NOC monitors the environment.
Updates run every second Saturday of the month, at night.
Backups run through the separate backup server, with a monthly snapshot in addition.
We drew up a processing agreement for Ilge’s ISO 27001 administration.
The Ilge development team emails directly with our helpdesk, in Dutch or English. For the new portal, we set up the production environment, with backend, frontend and search service.
Three reports from the first weeks show how we work: first the cause, then the solution.
Notification 1
The system disk of the production server was filling up, so that employees could no longer log into the portal. The cause was partly our own fault: the search service was on the small system disk instead of on the data volume. We moved the service the same morning and reported it to Ilge.
Notification 2
The portal’s SSL certificate expired, because the automatic renewal was coming soon. Standard validation didn’t work, because the security at Ilge is super tight.
With access to the DNS, we renewed the certificate the next morning via DNS validation. The underlying cause: an expired API connection with the DNS provider.
Message 3
The search service accepted connections but did not answer. A normal restart in the event of a crash does not absorb such a hang. We built a monitoring system that checks health every two minutes and restarts the service itself after two failed checks.
Result and follow-up
Ilge has a single point of contact for servers, certificates, DNS and the production environment of the new portal. The knowledge is recorded in keys, accounts, a maintenance window and a processing agreement.
The next step is a review of the infrastructure: cleaning up old configuration, looking at the location of the servers in relation to Ilge’s customers, and fixed reports about the environment.
Since 2008
For over 15 years, we have been providing secure and reliable IT to small and medium-sized businesses. For a fixed monthly fee and with short contracts.
Bank
From outdated system to a container environment with, as an IT department that the branch itself does not have.
MOJO Concerts
The largest concert provider in the Netherlands. We put their IT in order and reduced costs.
Municipality of Epe
Fixed updates, certificate management and 24/7 monitoring, so that the in-house ICT department could focus on the rest.
