If you have a server in a cupboard somewhere, there is a fair chance a UPS is sitting next to it, humming away and quietly needing a new battery every few years. So here is a question worth asking before you spend money keeping it going: do you still need it at all? My honest answer, for most practices, is probably not.
Let me explain what a UPS actually does, why I have gone off them, and the handful of times I still recommend one.
What a UPS is for
A UPS, or uninterruptible power supply, is a large unit full of battery packs that sits between the mains and your server. It really has two jobs.
The first is to shut your server down cleanly if a power cut goes on for more than a few minutes, so the machine is not simply killed mid-write. The second is to keep the server running for that window, typically around twenty minutes, sometimes longer with a bigger unit, so you can either keep working briefly or ride out a very short blip.
That was genuinely important once. The question is whether it still is.
Why I have gone off them
To be honest, I am not much of a fan any more, and it comes down to a few things.
Modern systems cope with power loss far better
Back in the 90s and early 2000s, with the file systems that came before NTFS, computers really did not like having the power pulled. Those of us who have been around a while will remember the Windows message telling you the machine had shut down uncleanly and now had to check the disk before it would let you back in.
Modern operating systems, databases and file systems handle a sudden power loss much better. They are built to recover from it. It is not impossible for a server to be damaged or corrupted by a hard power cut, but it is now genuinely rare, where it used to be almost expected. The single biggest reason a UPS existed has quietly shrunk.
The runtime does not really buy you much
Unless you have gone for an enormous, expensive unit, the time you get on battery is short. And here is the thing: you almost certainly cannot run the rest of the practice on it. The lights, the chairs, the scanners, the reception PCs, the phones, none of that is on the UPS. So even if the server stays up for twenty minutes, what are you actually doing with those twenty minutes if the rest of the building is dark? Operationally, often not very much.
This is part of a bigger shift. As practices move systems to the cloud, the local server matters less than it used to, which is the same trend we wrote about in running a modern practice without a server in the cupboard. If the important things live in the cloud, keeping one box alive for twenty minutes is a smaller and smaller prize.
They are a maintenance liability of their own
UPS units are relatively expensive, bulky, and a nuisance to commission and decommission. Worse, they often fail before the server does. I have seen plenty of cases where the UPS chassis itself failed and took the server down with it, which is the exact opposite of the job it was bought to do.
And the batteries wear out. They need replacing every few years, so a UPS is not a one-off purchase, it is a standing commitment to keep re-investing in a box whose main benefit has largely gone away.
When I do still recommend one
This is not an absolute rule, and there are still cases where a UPS earns its place.
If the practice is somewhere with a known poor or unstable power supply, one of those buildings that flickers every time the weather turns, then smoothing that out is worth it. And if a particular system or database is known to be fragile and unhappy about hard shutdowns, a clean automated shutdown is genuinely valuable. In those situations, yes, we still fit them. But those are the exceptions now, not the default.
What to do with the one you already have
If you already own a UPS, there is no need to rip it out today. Keep it while it works. But when its battery next fails, do not feel obliged to spend on a replacement out of habit. Often the sensible move is simply to bypass it, power the server directly from the mains, and switch the UPS off.
The only mild catch is that these units are awkward to dispose of, so unless you actually need the shelf space back, it is perfectly fine to just leave the dead one sitting there, powered down and ignored, until you are having a proper clear out. Not elegant, but honest.
The real point: spend the budget where it counts
If you genuinely want the belt and braces reassurance of a UPS, then fine, get one. It is not a bad thing to own, and nobody will tell you off for it.
But for most practices, it is no longer the obvious buy it once was, and IT budgets are not infinite. Given the choice between a battery box that guards against a risk that has largely faded, and, say, proper layered security that guards against a threat arriving every single day, I know where I would put the money first.
That is really the message. Not "UPS bad", but "UPS rarely essential now, so make sure it is genuinely the best use of the pound before you spend it there". If you would like us to look at your setup and tell you honestly whether yours is still worth keeping, or whether that money is better spent elsewhere, get in touch and we will give you a straight answer.