Small, Virtual Sysadmin Services?

treesim asks: "I work for a tiny research company of five employees, with a growing need for a system administrator. However, our needs are unlikely to ever require a full time person, so I'm wondering if small, offsite sysadmin services exist (something like virtual assistants, since the larger corporate-sized outfits are just too much). On one hand, this seems an obvious niche to be filled by entrepreneurial moonlighters, but there are a ton of questions regarding trust. Nonetheless, we already have good relationships with offsite bookkeeping and payroll services. Am I just being naive, or does anyone have experience with outsourcing small-scale sysadmin tasks?"

Comments

Yep, this is advertising

[ThOr101]

So you asked for a company, here it is:

HandyNerds.com http://www.handynerds.com/

That's the company I run, and that is the service I provide. Honestly it is hit or miss if you get someone worth their while. Unfortunatly you won't discover this until you are in the thick of it.

If you want more information, let me know. Always happy to help.

--Brett

Re:It can be done, but trust is key

[silas_moeckel]

I will second that. All small sysadmin type jobs have been through referal for small companies they are mostly looking for a single face they get to know and trust.

ASP.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Am I just being naive, or does anyone have experience with outsourcing small-scale sysadmin tasks?""

That's what ASP's are for.

I remotly admin servers every day.

[dJCL]

This is exactly what I get paid to do.
We drop in a linux box for a router, and set you up with a vpn from that to out network. We SSH to linux systems, RDP to servers and VNC to desktops all from our office. If it breaks too badly, we head onsite.

We run multiple companies, from 2 people to over 200 people with no problems and minimal cost - if you're in Ottawa, I can help. Otherwise, just look up the smaller IT outsourcing firms. They are always willing to let you keep some control of things. But we also will think your an idiot if you interfere with us keeping things running for you by breaking it.(have had one or two who do that constantly)

The confidentiality is part of the contract, and is about as good as any other outsourced finance or the like.

Just do the standard checking around before choosing someone, there are a lot of pathetic fakes out there too, and I hate cleaning up after one of them has messed up a network.

Anyway...
Enjoy!

we do it, so we know why it's hard to do well

[daniel_bitpusher]

I run a company that does just this (BitPusher, LLC, http://www.bitpusher.com/). There are a number of different kinds of individuals and companies that do this, and there are challenges with all of them.

Individuals who do this are generally cheapest, and sometimes you can get past the trust issue by using a friend or a friend of a friend. On the flip side, they have a tendency to leave for day jobs when times get tight (or be hard to reach when busy if they're moonlighting).

Companies give you a few advantages -- they tend to be more stable (if one person leaves, you still have backup if they're well organized) and they can have a wider variety of expertise (so the odds of needing to bring in other parties is lower). But there are two challenges here. The first is that if they're not sufficiently well organized, you'll sometimes get someone who doesn't know your environment. The second -- if they charge by the hour -- is that no matter how worthy of your trust they are, it's still in their best interests to bill you for as many hours as possible. This means that most of the successful ones either find ways to get you to buy extra work, or don't do the proactive maintenance they should (so they get more revenue from the things that break).

We've taken the approach of managing IT infrastructure for a fixed monthly fee. This is tricky, but after a couple of years of using this model it's coming together. It's a difficult sale, because you have to get customers to agree in advance to pay for hidden IT labor costs (both ongoing minor maintenance and the periodic major incident) -- small companies are used to paying for IT reactively rather than budgeting for it. Also, you need to become actually good at the things that IT organizations always talk about being good at -- sharing information, doing proactive maintenance, documentation, following processes, etc. And the work is generally front-loaded, so most customers aren't profitable until the second year. And this model ends up having a little more overhead (despite being more efficient per customer) so it's hard for the whole thing to be profitable until you've grown enough to have some economies of scale. That said, about two years after converting from an hourly and project model to a fixed-monthly-fee model, we find it working quite well (and we're finally profitable again).