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Server Support, Migration & Honest End-of-Life Advice
Whether the box in the comms cupboard needs looking after, replacing, or retiring to the cloud - we maintain it, plan its succession, and give you the replace-or-migrate answer based on numbers, not what we would like to sell.
The Most Expensive Machine You Own Is the One Nobody Thinks About
Plenty of Perth businesses still run an on-premise server, and plenty of them should - line-of-business applications, local file performance, and site-specific gear all keep servers genuinely useful. The problem is that servers age silently. Warranties lapse, operating systems fall out of support, the backups nobody checks quietly stop, and the first symptom anyone notices is the morning nothing works.
Server support is two jobs. The first is keeping the one you have healthy: patching, monitoring, backup verification, and knowing its warranty and support dates before they matter. The second is the succession question every server eventually asks - replace the hardware, or move the workload to the cloud?
We answer that one with a costed comparison, not a reflex. Sometimes cloud wins clearly; sometimes a new box on the shelf is genuinely cheaper over five years. Because we take no hardware or hosting margin, we have no thumb on the scale - the recommendation follows the numbers.
What We Cover
Ongoing care hourly or managed; projects quoted fixed-scope.
Care for the server you have
- Patching that actually happens, with reboots scheduled - not skipped
- Monitoring for disk, backup and hardware warnings before they become outages
- Warranty and end-of-support dates tracked so nothing expires unnoticed
Replace vs cloud, costed
- A five-year comparison: new hardware vs cloud hosting vs retiring the workload entirely
- Application compatibility checked before anything is promised
- The honest option - sometimes the answer is keep it another two years
Planned cutovers
- Server-to-server or server-to-cloud with rehearsed steps and a rollback plan
- Done outside business hours - staff arrive to a working system
- Old hardware wiped properly, not left in a cupboard holding your data
Backup and recovery
- Backups covering the server workload, protected against ransomware
- Restore-tested so recovery time is a measured number
- Feeds straight into a disaster recovery plan if you want one
Two dates to check today
Find out when your server hardware warranty ends and when its Windows Server version leaves support. If either date has passed - or nobody knows - the business is running its most critical workload with no safety net and no plan.
Checking takes us minutes, and knowing turns a future emergency purchase into a scheduled, budgeted project.
Server Questions, Answered
What owners ask when the box starts making them nervous.
Should we replace our server or move to the cloud?
It depends on the workload, and anyone who answers before looking is selling something. Line-of-business apps with local hardware dependencies often favour replacement; file shares, email remnants and standard workloads usually favour cloud. We cost both over five years - hardware, licensing, power, hosting, support - and recommend whichever number wins. We take no margin on either path.
How much does server support cost?
Ad-hoc server work is $180/hr ex GST with the standard one-hour minimum. Ongoing maintenance can run ad-hoc or inside a managed agreement where the server is priced as part of your environment. Migrations and replacements are quoted fixed-scope after an assessment, so the number is known before anything starts.
Our server is old but works fine - what is the actual risk?
Three compounding ones: hardware past warranty can take days to source parts for, an out-of-support operating system stops receiving security patches and becomes the soft target on your network, and cyber insurers increasingly ask about unsupported systems. "Works fine" describes today; the risk question is about the morning it does not.
Can you migrate our server after hours so we lose no work time?
That is the standard approach. Migrations are rehearsed, run evenings or weekends with an agreed rollback point, and staff arrive to a working system. The one-way door moments happen while nobody is trading.
We only have one server - is managed monitoring overkill?
A single server is the strongest case for monitoring, not the weakest - it is a single point of failure with no redundancy. Disk warnings, failed backups and error patterns show up days or weeks before most failures; watched, they become scheduled fixes rather than emergencies.
Related Services
The pieces that usually sit alongside this work.
Not sure what state the server is really in?
A server health check answers it: warranty, support dates, backup reality, and what we would do next - in writing.
Support Perth IT Pty Ltd · Perth, Western Australia · $180/hr ex GST, one-hour minimum, then 30-minute increments · No call-out fee in metro Perth.