Ask HN: Would you pay for a 24/7 "sysadmin as a service"?

This is often tightly coupled to hosting providers. I've worked before at a company where we did hosting + full sysadmin services for high-performance computing.

The big challenges included finding talent (good sysadmins are not easy to find), keeping the right balance between employees and customers (you always need more employees than you think), and setting realistic expectations for pricing. When coupled with hosting, customers are often unprepared for how much extra management really does cost... If decoupled, would be interesting to see how you could price it.

There is a company out here that called me several days ago in regards to their service. I will summarize their business model.

They charge by the ticket and complexity of the issue. I.e. If they open a ticket for application support it starts at $10.00 per ticket. If the ticket takes over 2-hours to complete it increases to $20.00. If it goes over 6-hours then it increases to $25.00. At 12-hours it is $40.00. If the ticket isn't resolved in 12-hours they bite the bullet and have to figure it out.

For backup/maintenance/monitoring they create and implement a system that automates all this. They spend 10 hours a week updating/monitoring on their low-level package which costs $50.00. If you want to upgrade to premium support meaning they work on yours and only yours for those 10-hours then they charge 100% of the fee.

They also allow you to buy hours in bulk and then transfer the hours over billing cycles. So you can buy 100 hours of application support. This would let you set it at any level free of charge.

Their pricing is a little hard to understand so I don't recommend it but then again on a pay-per-use basis I guess it is the only way.

They also charge by the level of the ticket. They have Low, Medium, High, and Urgent. If you decide your ticket is low priority you pay the rates I discussed above. If you escalate each level increases your support ticket costs by 25%. The Urgent level is an increase of 50%.

So for application support general ticket, $10.00. Update it to Urgent would cost $23.50. ((($10.00 * 1.25) * 1.25) * 1.5)

There's sysadmin and then there's IT/helpdesk. A good sysadmin understands requirements, architecture, best practices, security, scalability, monitoring, auditing, did I mention security?

Someone comes to you with their app running on a single dedicated box running a webserver and database on the same machine... their site runs too slow and has too much downtime.

Can you:

  Upgrade DB to a master-slave redundant database with automatic failover and encrypted backups
  Setup a web farm behind a nginx reverse proxy
  Build a munin (or whatever) powered dashboard tracking system health and KPIs
  Verify proper backups, audit trails, log cycling, firewalls, and password policies are in place
  Oh, and by the way, audit their systems to make sure they're properly hardened, and make sure they have all the right updates installed

Most 'sysadmin' services are going to offer the last one or two bullets I think, for small change per month.

On the other hand, if you can do it all, perhaps a few days work, and yet worth thousand+ dollars to the client. I'd stay far, far away from anything involving support tickets and < $100 price tags.

I'm absolutely sure people would pay - if you look at the hosting industry people have been explicitly paying for 1/2 of this service for years in the form of 'managed' servers.

I think there's three parts of this service and they're all easy to bill for:

- per server for server setup and configuration with a higher charge for reusable images

- per server per month for monitoring and maintenance

- per hour for everything else

Thanks for the feedback. That's a good point about the hosting industry. I suppose the support/project side of the business should work well enough when disconnected from the hosting - having worked at a hosting company previously, that's definitely not a market I want to be in right now! :)

I have to do a lot of this stuff: backups, disaster recovery, security, monitoring, alerting, configuration management, documentation. I'm mediocre to bad.

I'd love to pay someone competent to do it.

Pricing:

What I really want to pay for is service and training. We are on a Dreamhost VPS right now. It's fine for our needs and I can manage it ok, but I've come across different problems that I wish there was a guru around to show me how to solve it. I've spent a ton of time with different problems, some that I've been able to solve, others that I haven't. I'd be happy to pay for someone to walk me through how to do it.

The best pricing model (for me) would be a system that is configured by you initially, after you talk with me. You spend X hours creating policies for me (i.e. written documentation). You charge me a one-time fee for the consultation, set-up, and documentation.

We keep you on retainer for some monthly fee but all other service/training is on a per-job basis. It might be a little odd that I'd pay you for training; you'd be essentially working yourself out of a job. But I think that could justify a higher rate. It would also prevent people from abusing you to do things that they should be able to do themselves... OR they would rather pay you at your high rate to move files around. Win-win. There are a lot of people that don't care to learn about this stuff, so maybe you would have a different tiered pricing for that type of service.

What you /shouldn't/ offer is an actual hosting setup. I know there are some tricky questions regarding how you can get access to the system if you don't host it (you'll have to come up with a reasonable policy) but the hosting market is quite saturated (I think). It'd be difficult for you to offer a differentiated product since most people look at hosting as a commodity.

I think your product differentiator will come to service and training. Contact me if you pursue this. We'd be really interested.

You're building a service company, and as such your greatest bottleneck will be finding good sysadmins (hard), good clients (harder) and retention (impossible).

Every company I know that has done this has struggled with all of the above.

I have paid many times for sys-admin as a service. It was called platinum server management the company i hired. there are several companies in this field that will remotely manage your colocated boxes or vps etc.

Thanks for the link, there is quite a lot of overlap between that company and the service I would like to offer.

don't let that deter you!

I certainly won't. Thank you for the reminder though :)

you might want to go on webhosting talk forum and search there. that is where i found these people.

I actually think this is a pretty good idea. If I were working at my own startup, I might even pay for this myself even though I have a decent amount of sysadmin skills. I can definitely see it being useful to consult with someone more experienced for those tough situations that have to be handled quickly.

Yes, absolutely.

We're still using dedicated boxes (10 of them) with a traditional hosting model for many of our clients. Right now, it's myself and a (great) part-time sysadmin I have on a monthly retainer.

I'm well aware of what I should and shouldn't bother a sysadmin with, so I'd be an ideal client for you.

I worked for a company that sells software to people who do this. Do some searching on "managed service provider".

You may also find MSPMentor (http://www.mspmentor.net/) interesting.

Hmm, that's interesting, thanks - ages ago, I used to work for an MSP in the SME sector, and I had not really thought of these two as equivalent. I suppose what I am thinking about could be considered a subset of MSP, with additional project work.

Yes, if it is in the right price range. I think there are some people offering it but it is somewhat hard to find and maybe a small part of their business.

Yes.

I worked for a company that did this. As an employee, it was pure hell.

We charged a flat-rate per company and as a result, people would call us every day for problems like "please move my icons from X to Y".

To make things worse, my boss never scaled the company properly so we had 5 employees managing 50+ companies, which resulted in hellish work conditions.

Interesting feedback, thanks. It sounds like that company could have benefited from caps on the amount of support per client or (perhaps better) caps on the client:staff ratio.