Servers, deployments, backups, SSL, monitoring — the boring stuff that keeps the lights on, handled.
These tools write server and deploy scripts quickly, and infrastructure code that is quietly wrong looks entirely normal. The failure I worry about most is the destructive step that reads as routine. I once found a deploy script wiping the directory a server uses to prove it owns its domain, so certificate renewals were going to stop silently — nothing errored, nothing alerted, and I caught it before it lapsed. That one had nothing to do with AI, but it is exactly the shape of mistake generated code makes look ordinary. So they get read line by line.
Moved a long-running operation off a fragile shared-hosting setup that was hanging weekly to a properly-configured VPS — daily file generation automated, monitoring in place, deployments scripted. Years in, infrastructure is something the client doesn't think about anymore.
Push to main, BitBucket fires a webhook, the server validates the signature, pulls, and rsyncs the right files into the right vhosts (each with its own .env). Used across our own production stack and several client setups.
Found and fixed a deployment script on a different project that was inadvertently wiping the .well-known directory used for ACME challenges — silently breaking renewals. Caught it before the cert lapsed.
Yes, and most of this work starts that way. The first pass is an audit — what is running, what is exposed, what renews automatically and what does not — because the usual finding is not that something is broken but that nobody has looked in two years and several things are one expiry away from an outage.
Because they get restored on a schedule, not just written on one. A backup is theory until you have restored from it. Automated backups with periodic restore tests are part of the arrangement, since the failure everyone discovers at the worst possible moment is a backup job that has been succeeding against an empty directory.
It does not, because renewal is automatic via Let's Encrypt and the renewal itself is monitored. An expired certificate takes a site down as completely as a dead server does, and it is one of the few outages that is entirely preventable with a cron job.
Yes. Migrations between hosts without downtime are standard work. The sequencing matters more than the copying: DNS cutover last, with the old host still serving until the new one is proven, so a rollback is always one change away rather than a rebuild.
Scripted, via git webhooks — push to main and the server pulls. Deployment by hand over FTP is where configuration drift comes from, and drift is what makes a server impossible to hand to anyone else.
I bill new work at $95 to $125 an hour, against $150 to $300 for a typical agency blended rate. Infrastructure is usually the smallest line on a project because most of it happens once: provisioning, SSL, scripted deployments and backups are a fixed piece of work, and what follows is either a small monthly retainer or simply hours when something needs doing. The server itself you pay for directly, to whoever hosts it, at their price.
For a single application with ordinary requirements, yes, and it is the first thing I suggest. A managed platform already handles most of the list on this page and charges less than the hours would cost. A real server starts winning when several applications should share one machine, when something needs to sit beside its database for latency, when a requirement names where the data physically lives, or when the platform's pricing has quietly outgrown the thing it is hosting.
Tell me what you're trying to fix — I'll reply the same day.
Tell me a bit about what you're trying to build. I'll reply the same day, and we can hop on a call if it makes sense.
Or reach me directly — support@techefficientllc.com or (480) 359-2485.