Ongoing operations for your digital infrastructure

The problem this solves

A small business has no system administrator and nobody whose job it is to make sure the domain does not expire, the second administrator still has access, the backups actually restore, and the payment card on the ad account is not the personal card of an employee who no longer works there. None of these tasks is urgent, so nobody does them, until the day they all become urgent at once.

A one-off audit shows the picture on a particular date. Six months later it is out of date: new services have appeared, a contractor has left, somebody granted access “for five minutes” and forgot to revoke it, a card expired, the phone with two-factor authentication was replaced. Resilience is not a state but a process.

The retainer covers exactly that gap. You do not hire a full-time specialist and you do not keep an agency on a full retainer. You have an external owner who knows your infrastructure, checks it to a schedule, and is the first to get involved when something happens.

What the retainer includes

• A monthly check against a checklist. Access and roles, the administrator list, domain status and auto-renewal, whether email and the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records are working, whether payment methods are current, whether backups exist and can be restored.
• Change control. Who gained and who lost access during the period. New contractors and departed employees do not sit in the system for years.
• Incident response. A priority contact channel. When a block or a loss of access happens, you are not starting from zero: I already have the map of your infrastructure and know what to check and in what order.
• Keeping the documentation current. An up-to-date ownership map: which accounts exist, who controls them, how to restore access. Updated with every change.
• Advice on decisions. Before you connect a new service, contractor or tool, you can ask what it will mean for access and data.
• Planned improvements. Every month I close one or two items from the resilience plan instead of postponing them until the next incident.

What a month looks like

1. 1Onboarding. We start with the onboarding step: I describe the current state, build the ownership map and the resilience plan. Without that, the retainer would be work done blind.
2. 2The scheduled check. Once a month I go through the checklist and send a short report: what was checked, what changed, what needs a decision from you. Usually one page.
3. 3Work on the plan. I close the next items: a second administrator, backup codes, moving payments to the legal entity, testing a restore from backup.
4. 4Incidents as they arise. A block, a lost device, a departing employee, a disputed charge: I respond within the agreed window.
5. 5A quarterly review. Every three months I look at the whole picture: what has changed in the business and what new dependencies have appeared.

I do not replace development and I do not do marketing. The retainer has one job: the business must not lose access to its money, its customers or its communication.

Who it fits and who it does not

• A good fit. Companies of 1 to 20 people with no in-house IT: studios, agencies, local services, online shops, consultancies.
• A good fit. A business that has already been through a block or a loss of access and does not want a repeat.
• A good fit. Companies with a distributed team and contractors, where access is granted often and revoked rarely.
• Not a fit. Organisations with their own IT department and internal policies: they need process integration, not an external owner.
• Not a fit. Requests along the lines of “run our website and do tasks for us”: that is product development and support, a different service.
• Not a fit. Companies that need round-the-clock response. I do not offer that, see the response windows below.

Why this is cheaper than emergency mode

The cost of an incident is almost never equal to the cost of the recovery. On top of paying the contractor come the stopped advertising, the lost enquiries, the lost correspondence, the owner's time spent instead of working, and the reputational cost of silence in response to customer messages. A week without an ad account, for a shop or a local studio, works out noticeably more expensive than a year of the retainer.

Beyond the economics there is a management effect: the owner gets a clear point of responsibility. You do not have to decide who to call and what to check first, because the question goes to someone who already knows the structure. In a company of two to five people that removes a whole class of tasks the founder had been doing as an afterthought and, as a rule, badly.

Finally, the retainer makes predictable what used to be a lottery. The domain renews, access is current, backups have been verified by an actual restore rather than in theory. It is boring, and the boredom is the point.

Plans and response windows

What I do not offer: round-the-clock support does not exist here, weekends and nights are not part of any plan. Outside the working window I answer when I can, but with no commitment. If your business needs 24/7 response, what you need is a duty rota rather than a contractor, and it is more honest to say so up front. A limit: I take no more than three clients on the Priority plan at any one time. Availability is not infinite, which is exactly why it is real. For comparison: €790 a month is roughly one day of a senior specialist's work in the EU and less than a third of the cost of an employee. You are not buying a pair of hands but access to the judgement of someone who has already worked through situations like yours. Minimum term 3 months, after which there is no commitment and you can leave at any time. Access recovery during an incident is charged separately.

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