In reply to Ron Seigel.

I'm going to quote Patrick Mackenzie because this is one of the most important things I ever read in my career:

"I run a couple of fairly complicated software systems, and am more a systems engineer than I am a system administrator. Case in point: I nearly lost $X00,000 last year (gulp) when I found out that my MySQL backup strategy for Appointment Reminder was not nearly as robust as I thought it was. (It worked out all right in the end, but I spent the six most stressful hours of my business life fixing things.)

Now, I could certainly bring in a sysadmin to poke around my systems, make sure all configs were optimized, and maybe develop a Chef recipe to bring a bare metal box all the way up to the production environment. And that might well cost me $10,000. But since I am once-burned and twice-shy, what I really care about isn't having the work done so much as it is never going through that heart attack again.

So let's say that there exists a service which does encrypted offsite backups (tarsnap.com). And let's say that it is technically impressive but far, far outside the ken of mere mortals to set up. And let's further stipulate that the founder is stark-raving mad about his pricing strategy and has decided that to ensure Appointment Reminder against $X00,000 losses should cost me, not a typo, $0.60 per month. If you, my contract sysadmin, were to say "Hey, in addition to all of this configuration tuning that I'm doing, how about I design and implement an encrypted backup strategy for you, and verify monthly that it is working correctly?", I would OK $500/month so fast your head would spin. You could then toss Tarsnap $0.60 a month for the storage, verify monthly that it did indeed decompress into a working MySQL dump, and cut invoices while remaining my favorite sysadmin ever."

The full article is here: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/services_vs_products