Don’t Let Summer Heat Fry Your Server (or Your Profits!)

Could The Dog Days Of Summer Be A Threat To Your Business?

Keep your server running cool despite the summer heat.

With the “dog days” of summer upon us, most business owners are looking for ways to keep their company’s sales and profits HOT, while keeping their IT expenses COOL. But if proper attention is not given to your server and network equipment during the summer, all that heat outside can actually bring your company’s growth to a grinding halt and increase your IT expenses significantly.

Excess heat can be a big problem for small to mid-sized business servers, since a server that becomes overheated usually costs more in energy, fails more often, and is more likely to crash. For most companies, a server crash can mean hours or days of downtime, unproductive employees, HUGE amounts of stress and thousands of dollars in lost opportunity.

7 Steps Every Business Owner Must Take To Prevent a Heat-Induced Server Crash

Here are a few simple things you can do to prevent your server and network equipment from overheating and crashing this summer:

1. Tidy up the server room; a neater room will increase airflow.
2. Keep the doors to the server room closed and seal off the space.
3. Make sure cold air reaches all the equipment.
4. Have a redundant A/C unit that is specifically designed for computers.
5. Buy a rack enclosure where the cooling is built into the bottom of the rack.
6. Keep the temperature at no more than 77 degrees Fahrenheit.
7. Consider virtualization or cloud computing so that you are generating a lower amount of heat in the first place.

Don’t let the summer heat get you down! Let our team of responsive IT experts protect your server and computer equipment with our Complete IT Care program. If your business has 10 or more employees, contact us today get all the benefits of a highly-trained, full-time computer support and services technology department at only a fraction of the cost of hiring an in-house tech.

Frozen treat photograph by Sally Robertson, Colored Pencil Magazine, via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons license.