I look after servers, clusters and busy websites so the people who depend on them never have to think about it. No 3am phone calls, no surprise outages, no backups that turn out to be empty.
That has been the job for ten years at Krystal Hosting, looking after production infrastructure and spending a fair amount of time at the sharp end of things going wrong. Alongside it I take on contract work of my own: Linux and cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, WordPress, and the general IT that keeps a business running day to day. Mostly for news organisations, ecommerce retailers and a handful of smaller businesses.
The brief is usually some version of the same three things. Something is slow, something is broken, or nobody has checked the backups in a very long time.
What I get called in for
Something is on fire
Incident response and debugging. Sites down, servers thrashing, mysterious 500s at the worst possible moment. I find the cause, not just the symptom.
Something is slow
Performance work across Linux servers, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes and busy WordPress sites. Caching, database queries, resource limits, and the unglamorous business of measuring before changing anything.
Nobody is watching it
Monitoring and alerting that tells you before your customers do, backups that have actually been restored from at least once, and security patching that happens on a schedule rather than after a breach.
Somebody is doing it by hand
Automation and scripting for the repetitive jobs, plus ongoing management so routine maintenance stays done without anyone having to remember it.
Nobody here does IT
General IT for businesses without anyone in house. User accounts, laptops, access, the day to day requests, and someone sensible to call when a thing stops working and nobody knows why.
Where I have done it
Krystal Hosting
Day to day administration of production Linux infrastructure at scale. Performance work, security patching, monitoring, and a long education in the ways systems fail when a lot of people are depending on them.
Independent contract work
Infrastructure, websites and general IT for national news publishers, ecommerce retailers and small businesses. Keeping busy WordPress sites quick and online, looking after Linux and cloud environments, clearing up after outages, and leaving behind monitoring and backups that mean the next problem gets caught early.
Get in touch
I fit contract work around the full time role, so how much I can take on varies. Tell me what is going wrong and I will give you an honest answer about whether I am the right person for it.