Services
System administration and server management
Someone whose job is that the servers are patched, backed up, monitored and boring.
- Indicative rate
- $20–52 / hour
- Shortlist
- 3 CVs in 48 hours
- Overlap
- 4–8 hours daily, contracted
- We accept
- 1 engineer in 12
How it works
Every company reaches the point where infrastructure needs an owner but not a department. Patching slips, backups are untested, monitoring is a dashboard nobody opens, and the person holding it together is a developer who would rather be writing code. That is the gap this fills.
A system administrator from us takes the estate as it is — Linux, Windows, on-premise, cloud or the usual mixture — and makes it predictable: patch windows that happen, backups that are restored on a schedule rather than trusted, monitoring with thresholds someone chose, documented runbooks, and user and access administration that survives an audit.
Because the group runs its own hosting and holds ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II, the controls applied to your estate are the ones we already live under. This is also the cheapest thing we sell, and deliberately so: it is maintenance work, and pricing it like engineering work would be dishonest.
Choosing the right model
When another model fits better
Do not buy this to redesign the estate. If the answer to your problem is a migration, a pipeline or an architecture change, that is DevOps and platform engineering, and an administrator will keep a bad design alive rather than fix it. Buy this when the design is fine and the operating discipline is not.
Every engagement model here is priced on the rates page, so you can compare the options rather than take our word for which one fits.
Rates
Rate bands by experience and market
| Experience | United States | United Kingdom | Australia | United Arab Emirates | Canada |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| build2–4 years | $20–28/hour$3,200–4,480/month | £150–210/day£3,000–4,200/month | A$28–38/hourA$4,480–6,080/month | AED 95–135/hourAED 15,200–21,600/month | C$30–40/hourC$4,800–6,400/month |
| senior5–8 years | $28–38/hour$4,480–6,080/month | £210–300/day£4,200–6,000/month | A$38–52/hourA$6,080–8,320/month | AED 135–185/hourAED 21,600–29,600/month | C$40–54/hourC$6,400–8,640/month |
| lead9+ years, or tech lead | $38–52/hour$6,080–8,320/month | £300–450/day£6,000–9,000/month | A$52–70/hourA$8,320–11,200/month | AED 185–250/hourAED 29,600–40,000/month | C$54–72/hourC$8,640–11,520/month |
All-inclusive and indicative, shown so you can compare us against a local hire. Monthly figures assume 160 hours a month and the same for the day-rate markets, so the two always reconcile. Engagements are contracted as a monthly capacity fee or a fixed-scope deliverable, with our own delivery lead accountable for the outcome — see engagement models. There is no setup fee, no recruitment fee and no management surcharge.
Questions
System administration and server management
- Can you cover nights and weekends?
- Yes. The India timezone makes overnight cover for US and UK estates straightforward rather than a premium — the shift is someone's normal working day, not a pager rota.
- Linux or Windows?
- Both, and the mixture most estates actually are. Where the work is heavily one or the other we shortlist accordingly rather than placing a generalist against it.
- How is this different from a managed service provider?
- An MSP gives you a ticket queue and a shared pool. Here you get a named administrator who learns your estate, sits in your tooling and is on your side of the table. For a small estate an MSP is often cheaper, and we will say so.
- What access do they need?
- Named accounts under your directory, scoped to the systems in the agreement, with MFA and logging. Shared credentials are declined — they make the audit trail worthless.
Other ways to work with us
DevOps and platform engineering
Pipelines, clusters, infrastructure as code and the telemetry that turns an outage into a five-minute diagnosis.
Hand over a function — maintenance, QA, cloud operations, support — with the service level written down.
Named engineers inside your team, reporting to your leads, working your hours.
Send us one role brief
One page is enough: the stack, the seniority, the first month of work and the hours you need covered. Three shortlisted CVs come back within 48 hours, with the rate band and notice period attached.