VPS & Server Management
Servers set up, secured, monitored and kept running — by people who answer.
A VPS gives you control and hands you the responsibility that comes with it: updates, firewalls, certificates, backups, and being the person awake when it goes down at 3am. We take that on — provisioning and hardening servers, setting up monitoring that warns before users notice, and running backups that are actually restored and verified rather than assumed to work. We also inherit servers nobody documented, which is most of them.
A backup you have never restored is not a backup
The most common failure we are called in for is a backup that was running for years and turned out to be unusable — wrong database, missing uploads, or an archive nobody ever opened. We configure backups off-site, then restore them on a schedule to prove they work, because the alternative is discovering the truth on your worst day.
Hardening is unglamorous and it is what keeps you online
Key-only SSH, a real firewall, fail2ban, automatic security updates, TLS that renews itself, and services running as users that cannot write to their own code. None of it is clever. All of it is the difference between a server that is quietly probed a thousand times a day and one that is quietly compromised.
What we do in the first week
Inventory before changes. We document what is running, which ports are open, what is scheduled, where the data lives and who has access — because most servers we inherit have at least one service nobody remembers installing. Only then do we harden anything, so a change never takes down something undocumented that mattered.
Monitoring that says something useful
An alert for every spike trains you to ignore alerts. We monitor the things that predict an outage — disk filling, memory trending up, certificates approaching expiry, a service restarting repeatedly — and stay quiet otherwise. The measure of good monitoring is that when it does speak, you look.
Frequently asked questions
- What does managed VPS actually include?
- Setup and hardening, security updates, TLS certificates, backups with verified restores, monitoring and alerting, and someone to call when something breaks. It does not include the VPS itself — you keep that account in your own name, which means you keep control.
- Can you take over a server someone else set up?
- Yes, and it is a large part of what we do. We audit what is running, document it, fix the security gaps, put real backups and monitoring in place, and give you a written picture of what you actually own.
- Can you migrate our site without downtime?
- In almost all cases. We stage the move on the new server, sync data, verify it, then cut DNS over — with the old server kept alive until the change has fully propagated.
- Do we need to give you root access?
- We work with our own accounts and SSH keys rather than a shared root password, so access is per-person and can be revoked individually. The server stays in your name and your account: you can remove our access at any time without involving us.
- What is your response time if something breaks?
- It depends on the plan, and we would rather agree a number we can meet than quote one that sounds good. Monitoring alerts us before most users notice, which is usually worth more than a faster promise to react afterwards.