What to monitor
- HTTP and HTTPS availability.
- cPanel, WHM, webmail, SMTP, IMAP, POP3, DNS, FTP, and SSH.
- Disk usage, inode usage, CPU load, memory, swap, and IO wait.
- Mail queue size.
- Backup job success.
- SSL certificate expiry.
- RAID or disk health where available.
Response plan
Monitoring should alert a responsible person, not just create logs. Define who responds, how fast they respond, and what steps they take for common alerts.
Server owner responsibility
Owning a server includes updates, firewall, backups, monitoring, licenses, abuse response, mail reputation, DNS, and customer communication. Keep a written checklist so routine tasks are not handled from memory.
Quick support handoff
If this article does not solve the issue, open a support ticket with the domain, service name, exact error, time the problem started, and what changed recently.
