Why Every Server Deserves a Name (And Server1 Just Won't Do)

One thing I genuinely miss about the move from servers to cloud is the physicality of it all. Servers were things you built, racked, upgraded, maintained and looked after. I wouldn't go so far as to say they were friends or colleagues, I'm not quite nerdy enough for that, but they mattered, and they had a uniqueness about them. Every build was slightly different in some subtle way, depending on who built it, where it was going, and what it was for.

Some were cheap filler boxes for non essential jobs. Some were twenty grand monsters running a decent sized business with hundreds of users depending on them every single day. Either way, they deserved a bit of respect.

Why Bother Naming Them?

This is the bit that used to baffle customers. We'd name servers, and they'd either find it bizarre, or just shrug and not really care. But there was always a method to it.

Giving a server a proper name gives it a bit of personality. It helps you remember it. And for an engineer, it creates a small sense of care and association, even if you're slightly personifying or anthropomorphising a box of metal and disks. That's not a bad thing. You want your engineers to look after these machines, and anything that helps them identify with the kit, even just a little, is all for the better.

Compare that to SERVER1. Or worse, SERVER01, or SERVER001. I've never liked that approach, as if a small site is ever going to have nine servers, let alone ninety nine. Something like SERVER-2026 at least makes a bit of sense, if a bit dull. But then your whole estate ends up looking the same. No character, no association, no personality. Just a yawn of an inventory list.

Now, I wouldn't do this across an entire network. PC naming needs a proper defined schema, and we always used something like SITE-LOCATION (or the user's name if it barely changes hands) along with an install date. That's just sensible asset management. But servers are different. They're special. They deserve a name.

A Favourite Customer, A Favourite Name

One of my all time favourite customers was Lis Cox at Cox's Dental Care. She was lovely. Personable, trusted the advice we gave her, cared about her business, and was just genuinely nice to work with. When we named her server WAMPANOAG, she thought it was hilarious. That server, and that name, remains one of my favourites from twenty five years in this trade.

Some Of The Best Names We Ever Used

Over the years we built up quite a collection of names, some clever, some daft, none of them boring.

For a group of dental suite servers linked site to site, we named them after the location for easy identification: LEDA because it was in Leicester, LOKI because it was in Loughborough, and NOTUS because it was in Nottingham.

At another site, we named servers after local landmarks: MOTTE and BAILEY.

The first Dell server we installed, after flirting with Dell once HP got a bit too expensive, was proudly named ADELE.

A WiFi controller, which manages the flow of wireless traffic across a site, became POSEIDON, because he controls the waves.

At one site the original server had been called SHAMU, so we kept the whale theme going as the estate grew. The host became POD, the data server became BELUGA, and the imaging server became NARWHAL.

A set of replication servers became ROMULUS and REMUS, twins looking after each other's data.

And another bunch of replication servers, less mythological but no less fitting, simply became THING1 and THING2.

A Small Thing That Mattered

None of this changed the uptime, the specs, or the support contract. But it changed how engineers thought about the kit they were responsible for. A named server felt like something worth looking after properly, not just another line on an asset register.

Cloud has taken a lot of that away. Everything is abstracted, virtualised, spun up and torn down without much ceremony. That's progress, and I'm not arguing against it. But I do miss the days when a server had a bit of personality, a name that made you smile, and a story behind it.

So if you're still running physical kit, do yourself a favour. Skip SERVER01. Give it a name with a bit of character. Your engineers will thank you for it, even if your customers just think you're a bit odd.