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The Complete Guide to Becoming A Web Administrator
The truth about the pay, the path, and the day-to-day reality of running the servers behind the web — before you spend a dime on a degree or a bootcamp.
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: What Does a Web Administrator Actually Do?
Let's start by clearing away the fog. When you see the job title "Web Administrator" on a posting, you might imagine someone who sits in a cozy office, tweaking the layout of a website or fixing broken links. That is not the job. A web administrator is the person who keeps the website alive and responding. You are the one holding the server together when thousands of people are trying to access a page at the same time, and you are the one who gets the phone call at 3:00 AM when the site goes down for no apparent reason. It is a technical operations role, more akin to being a building superintendent for a high-rise office tower than a graphic designer. You do not build the website's visuals; you build the foundation that lets the visuals exist.
The core of the role can be broken into four buckets: keeping the servers running, deploying new versions of the code, managing security, and monitoring everything. Let's look at each one in detail, because this is what you will actually spend your time on.
Keeping the servers running is the most fundamental duty. A web administrator manages the physical or cloud-based servers that host websites. In the old days, this meant racking physical hardware in a data center, plugging in cables, and replacing failed hard drives. Today, most companies use cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. Instead