The part about log rotation strikes me as an anachronism, which, sadly, is still applicable due to naive default configurations.<p>Disk <i>space</i> is preposterously cheap, and even high-volume, Internet-scale text logs are small and low-bandwidth[1].<p>The problem isn't that disks fill up, but, rather, that logs are ever written somewhere that, if full, affects anything but the logging. The solution of a separate filesystem for logs has been around perhaps longer than the OP himself but only makes sense for a few, standalone servers.<p>Otherwise, the solution of remote syslog has been around for almost as long. If your logs are critical, you could even use two (for twice the price). Even the days of questionable reliability and small message size[2] limits are pretty long gone with syslog-ng.<p>This kind of thing, otherwise tedious minutae, is second nature to sysadmins. Hire one.<p>[1] It's the disk <i>bandwidth</i> or throughput which is still expensive<p>[2] That's on the order of 500 characters, old text pager lengths, not the newfangled 140 character sms/twitter cheapness. Hey, you kids get off my lawn!
This is a great reminder why I moved to Heroku ;-)<p>(the points re. backup and monitoring do still apply, but at least it's only for your app and not the whole server)
Does anyone have any thoughts on using config software like Puppet or Chef? I've been having to deploy a few more servers lately and this is exactly what I may need, curious to hear of experiences.
Backups are all well and good, but really they aren't going to save you unless you are also doing frequent <i>test restores</i>. Only when you've acted out your worst-case scenario (with a set of virtual machines and a recent set of backups) and managed to restore the system without problem do you really know that your backups are adequate.