With my new server I bought a UPS, partly just as a Good Thing, but also because I suspect a powercut fried the motherboard on a previous machine that I had, and this baby is too precious to lose ;)

The idea is that the UPS will smooth out the power supply to my server, protecting it from surges or temporarily blips in power loss. If there’s a proper power cut, the UPS is connected to my server and can initiate a graceful shutdown instead of system crash. It seems unintuitive in this day and age of laptops and iPads that you just close or switch off to “suspend” them that killing the power to a server can damage it, but when you think about it just a moment more, it’s hardly surprising.