The Delicious Brains site has posted the final part of their "Hosting WordPress Yourself" series to their site. In this latest tutorial they cover ongoing maintenance tasks for your server to keep it running smoothly and secure.

So you’ve followed our in-depth guide and built yourself a shiny new server that’s secure and tuned for optimal WordPress performance, but what’s next? In this installment of Hosting WordPress Yourself, I’m going to outline a few tasks that should be carried out on a regular basis to ensure that your server continues to run securely and perform well. We’ll look at performing software updates, upgrading PHP, and a few “gotchas” to watch out for that we may have experienced ourselves. Let’s dive straight in!

The article is broken up into several sections, each with a summary providing a bit more background:

• Keep Plugins and Themes Updated
• Check Backups are Running
• Keep an Eye on Server Metrics
• Watch Those Log Files
• Update Server Packages
• Upgrade PHP

They also talk about upgrading the OS itself (Ubuntu) and how to outline an action plan that, when used regularly, can keep your system and software up-to-date easily.