Consulting & Technical Assistance

Level 1 block hours cover general consulting, troubleshooting, configuration, small migrations, and routine maintenance. These packages are designed for small business clients needing reliable expert support without enterprise-scale commitment. Prepaid hours remove guesswork and keep scope under control.

What Level 1 Covers: Website troubleshooting and performance diagnosis, email deliverability fixes, DNS configuration, cPanel and VPS setup, small platform migrations, security patching, backup configuration, and general infrastructure maintenance. If the problem is well-defined and the environment is straightforward, Level 1 is the right starting point.

Structured Engineering Capacity: Block hours work particularly well for troubleshooting scenarios where the scope is not immediately clear. Rather than estimating blindly or stopping investigation when time runs out, block hours enable thorough root cause analysis and comprehensive resolution without scope negotiation interruptions. Hours can be used across multiple sessions as needed.

On-Demand Rate: Work outside a block package is billed at $175/hour during normal business hours (Monday–Friday, 8:00 AM–6:00 PM), $325/hour after hours and weekends, and $600/hour for emergency red-eye work (midnight–8:00 AM and holidays). Minimum billing increment is one hour.

Level 1 Packages:

• 2 Hours — $199: Focused troubleshooting or small implementation work. Good for investigating specific problems, implementing targeted fixes, or handling defined configuration changes.
• 5 Hours — $450: Mid-scale projects or deeper troubleshooting. Suitable for small migrations, multi-component fixes, or investigating and resolving complex technical issues.
• 10 Hours — $750: Larger projects or ongoing maintenance. Appropriate for significant migrations, comprehensive security implementations, or monthly maintenance commitments.

Hours can be used across multiple calendar periods, ensuring flexibility for projects with implementation dependencies or sequential stages.

Ready to Start?
Level 1 block hours provide predictable expert engineering capacity for everyday technical challenges. Contact us to discuss your project.

Level 2 engagements are designed for complex, multi-system technical work requiring sustained senior engineering effort. This tier covers advanced infrastructure design, security remediations involving multiple components, complex email architecture, multi-platform integrations, and projects where the full scope only becomes clear during investigation.

What Level 2 Covers: Complex email routing and filtering architecture, multi-system infrastructure migrations, security audit and remediation programs, VPS and Proxmox environment design and build, email deliverability remediation for high-volume senders, DNS architecture for complex environments, compliance-adjacent technical implementations, and mid-market system integrations. Level 2 is the right tier when the problem is sophisticated, the environment has multiple moving parts, or the deliverable needs to be production-grade.

Dedicated Senior Engineering: Level 2 engagements are handled at senior engineering level throughout. Work is not triaged or delegated to junior resources. Every session advances the project with the same engineer who understands the full context of your environment.

Project Continuity: Unused Level 2 hours carry forward for 90 days from purchase, ensuring flexibility for projects with staged implementation or dependencies on third-party timelines.

Level 2 Packages:

• 10 Hours — $1,500 ($150/hr): Advanced troubleshooting, focused architecture review, or a defined implementation phase. Suitable for single-system redesigns or targeted security remediations.
• 20 Hours — $2,800 ($140/hr): Multi-session project work. Appropriate for infrastructure migrations, email system redesigns, or security hardening programs across multiple components.
• 40 Hours — $5,200 ($130/hr): Substantial engineering engagement for larger implementations. Covers complex multi-platform projects, comprehensive security programs, or phased infrastructure builds requiring planning, execution, and validation.

Custom Level 2 packages are available. All engagements are quoted and invoiced manually — contact us to discuss your specific requirements before purchasing.

Ready for a Level 2 Engagement?
Senior engineering capacity for complex technical challenges. Contact us to scope your project.

Level 3 Enterprise engagements are reserved for large-scale custom architecture, regulated industry deployments, AI-powered system design, and complex compliance-driven technical programs. This is not a product purchase — it is a structured consulting engagement with defined deliverables, senior architecture oversight, and written documentation your organisation can act on independently.

What Level 3 Covers: Custom intelligent email parsing and routing systems at enterprise scale, APRA CPS-230 and regulated industry email continuity architecture, AI-powered classification and workflow automation design, large infrastructure builds across multiple platforms, compliance documentation packages for board and regulatory submissions, Discovery and Gap Assessment engagements, architecture blueprints with defined RTO/RPO commitments, process flowcharts mapping current state and future state, and material service provider due diligence packages.

Structured Engagement Model: Level 3 engagements follow a defined phase model. Discovery & Gap Assessment establishes the full requirements picture and produces written deliverables before any build begins. Architecture Design produces the technical blueprint. Deployment executes against the approved design. Testing & Documentation validates the build and produces the compliance evidence package. Ongoing Managed Retainer handles post-deployment support and periodic re-testing obligations.

Written Deliverables Included: Every Level 3 engagement produces formal written outputs — architecture documents, process flowcharts, infrastructure specifications, compliance gap analyses, and evidence packages. These deliverables have standalone value and can be presented to compliance teams, boards, and regulators regardless of whether subsequent phases proceed.

No Expiry on Enterprise Hours: Level 3 hours carry forward indefinitely into subsequent phases. Unused Discovery hours roll directly into the Architecture or Build engagement — there is no pressure to consume hours artificially within a calendar period.

Level 3 Enterprise Packages:

• 40 Hours — $6,500 ($162.50/hr): Focused enterprise Discovery or a defined architecture phase. Produces a written gap analysis, requirements definition, and preliminary architecture recommendation. Suitable for scoping a larger engagement or addressing a specific compliance requirement.
• 80 Hours — $12,000 ($150/hr): Full Discovery & Architecture Assessment for complex environments. Covers environment review, requirements sessions with multiple stakeholders, infrastructure sizing, process flowchart of current and future state, preliminary architecture blueprint, and a clear scope and budget for the build phase. Recommended starting point for enterprise and regulated-industry engagements.
• 160 Hours — $22,400 ($140/hr): Extended engagement covering Discovery through initial build phase. Suitable for organisations needing a complete solution delivered end-to-end under a single engagement agreement.

All Level 3 engagements are individually quoted and governed by a formal consulting agreement prior to commencement. Contact us to discuss your requirements — we will assess fit and provide a proposed engagement scope before any commitment is made.

Enterprise Architecture Engagements
Purpose-built systems for regulated industries, enterprise-scale deployments, and complex compliance programs. Unused hours carry forward with no expiry.
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Modern workflow and email automation designed cleanly and reliably. Our automation design bridges DNS, email routing, Proxmox, databases, and APIs—eliminating manual steps and reducing operational load. We prioritize reliability, auditing, and secure integration so AI enhances your workflow without introducing instability.

Intelligent Email Processing & Routing: Organizations receive thousands of structured emails requiring human interpretation and action—customer inquiries, support tickets, order notifications, compliance reports, vendor communications, system alerts, and operational notifications. Manually processing these messages consumes significant time, introduces delays, creates classification errors, and diverts human attention from higher-value work. Intelligent email parsing and automated workflow routing transforms this operational burden.

We design AI-powered email processing systems that extract structured data from messages (sender information, subject classification, content entities, dates, financial data, priority signals), classify messages by type and urgency, route content to appropriate systems or personnel, trigger automated responses or workflows, and maintain audit trails of processing actions. These systems handle routine processing automatically while escalating complex or ambiguous cases to human review—combining AI efficiency with human judgment where needed.

Local LLM Integration & Privacy: Organizations with strict data privacy requirements—healthcare, legal services, financial institutions, government contractors—often cannot send data to external AI services without violating compliance obligations or contractual restrictions. We're developing local LLM automation capabilities that run entirely on your infrastructure—whether dedicated Proxmox nodes, VPS instances, or private cloud environments. Email content, customer information, operational data, and business intelligence never leaves your environment.

Workflow Automation & Orchestration: Beyond email processing, we design broader workflow automation spanning multiple systems and process steps. This might include automated provisioning workflows (new customer account creation triggering service setup, credentials generation, welcome communications), compliance workflows (monitoring regulatory requirements, triggering periodic reviews, maintaining documentation), infrastructure workflows (automated backup verification, certificate renewal, security scanning, performance monitoring), or business process workflows (approval routing, document processing, notification chains).

These automation designs focus on reliability and observability. Every automation includes comprehensive logging, error handling with graceful degradation, alerting when human intervention is required, and audit trails showing what actions were taken and why. Automation should reduce operational burden and risk, not create mysterious black boxes that fail silently or behave unpredictably.

Ready to Automate Your Workflows?
AI and automation projects are custom-designed for your needs. Contact us to discuss your automation opportunities.

Fast diagnosis and resolution of website, DNS, or email delivery issues. Our troubleshooting approach isolates root causes instead of applying temporary patches. We analyze logs, delivery paths, DNS behavior, security posture, and infrastructure dependencies to ensure the fix is permanent and the environment remains stable.

Common Troubleshooting Scenarios: Website errors, slowness, or timeouts often stem from resource exhaustion, database bottlenecks, misconfigured caching, or external service dependencies. Email delivery problems might involve authentication failures (SPF/DKIM/DMARC), DNS configuration errors, IP reputation issues, or spam filtering policies. VPS or hosting misconfigurations can cause intermittent failures that are difficult to diagnose without systematic investigation.

We diagnose problems methodically—examining logs, testing components in isolation, tracing request paths, validating configurations, and identifying patterns in failure behavior. This systematic approach reveals root causes that reactive troubleshooting misses, ensuring fixes address underlying problems rather than treating symptoms that will recur.

Problems That Come and Go: Intermittent issues are particularly frustrating because they're difficult to reproduce and investigate. These problems often involve timing-dependent interactions—race conditions, resource contention during peak loads, caching inconsistencies, DNS propagation delays, or external service timeouts. We use monitoring data, log analysis, and systematic testing to identify patterns and triggers for intermittent failures.

Issues That Keep Returning: When problems recur despite previous fixes, the original troubleshooting likely addressed symptoms rather than root causes. We investigate why fixes failed to prevent recurrence—identifying whether the original diagnosis was incomplete, whether environmental changes reintroduced problems, or whether fixes created new issues. Persistent problems require deeper investigation to ensure permanent resolution.

Your emails aren't reaching customers. We'll fix it through systematic diagnosis and remediation of authentication, reputation, and configuration issues.

Authentication & Standards Compliance: Modern email delivery requires proper SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configuration. SPF (Sender Policy Framework) authorizes sending servers, DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) cryptographically signs messages, and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) specifies how receivers should handle authentication failures. Misconfigured authentication causes legitimate messages to be rejected or marked as spam.

We audit your complete authentication chain—verifying SPF records authorize all legitimate sending sources, ensuring DKIM signatures validate correctly, reviewing DMARC policies for appropriate enforcement levels, and analyzing DMARC reports to identify authentication failures. Authentication problems often involve subtle misconfigurations: missing servers in SPF records, incorrect DKIM selector configurations, or DMARC policies that are too strict or too permissive.

Reputation & Blacklist Management: Sending server IP addresses and domains develop reputation scores based on sending patterns, complaint rates, spam trap hits, and authentication compliance. Poor reputation causes messages to be filtered or rejected before reaching recipients. We investigate reputation issues—checking blacklist status across major providers, analyzing bounce patterns for reputation signals, reviewing complaint rates and feedback loops, and identifying sending behaviors that damage reputation.

Blacklist removal requires identifying why the IP or domain was listed (compromised accounts, malware, spam complaints, poor authentication), remediating the underlying issue, and following removal procedures for each blacklist operator. Simply requesting removal without fixing root causes results in relisting.

Configuration & Routing Issues: DNS configuration errors—incorrect MX records, missing reverse DNS, DNSSEC validation failures—cause delivery problems that are often intermittent or affect specific recipients. Split-domain routing configurations introduce additional complexity where messages for some users should route internally while others route to external services. These scenarios require careful DNS and routing logic to prevent misdelivery or authentication failures.

Your site got hacked. We'll clean it, identify how access was gained, and prevent recurrence through comprehensive remediation and security hardening.

Incident Containment & Analysis: The first priority is containing the incident to prevent further damage—isolating compromised systems, blocking malicious access, and preventing lateral movement to other infrastructure. We then conduct forensic analysis to understand the attack timeline, identify compromised accounts or systems, determine what data may have been accessed or exfiltrated, and trace the initial access vector.

Understanding how access was gained is critical for preventing recurrence. Common vectors include outdated software with known vulnerabilities, weak or reused passwords, SQL injection or other application vulnerabilities, compromised third-party plugins or themes, exposed administrative interfaces, or stolen credentials from previous breaches. Forensic investigation reveals which vulnerabilities were exploited and what other systems might be at risk.

Malware Removal & Cleanup: Attackers install backdoors and persistence mechanisms to maintain access even after the initial compromise is discovered. We identify all malicious code—including obfuscated payloads, hidden persistence mechanisms, modified core files, injected database content, and malicious cron jobs or scheduled tasks. Cleanup must be thorough; missing a single backdoor allows reinfection.

Malware removal requires careful validation to avoid breaking legitimate functionality. We differentiate between malicious modifications and legitimate customizations, restore clean versions of compromised files, validate database integrity, and test functionality after cleanup to ensure the site operates correctly.

Security Hardening & Prevention: After cleanup, we implement security improvements to prevent recurrence—updating all software to current secure versions, implementing proper file permissions and ownership, removing unnecessary functionality that increases attack surface, strengthening authentication mechanisms, implementing web application firewalls, configuring intrusion detection monitoring, and establishing regular security update procedures. The goal is making the environment more secure than before the compromise occurred.

For sites on shared hosting where security is fundamentally limited, we recommend migration to Secure VPS or Managed VPS environments that provide better isolation, security controls, and monitoring capabilities. Attempting to secure fundamentally insecure hosting is often futile.

Don't wait for disaster. Protect your data and email NOW through verified backup procedures, email continuity services, and documented recovery processes.

Email Continuity During Outages: When primary email servers are down—whether due to hardware failures, network outages, software problems, or security incidents—inbound messages are typically rejected or bounce back to senders. StrataMail Backup MX provides email continuity by queuing messages during outages and delivering them when service is restored, preventing message loss and ensuring business communication continues.

Verified Backup Procedures: Backups that aren't regularly tested provide false security. We implement and verify backup procedures—configuring automated backup jobs with appropriate frequency and retention, testing restore procedures to validate backup integrity, documenting restoration steps so recovery doesn't depend on specific personnel, establishing off-site backup storage to protect against site-level disasters, and monitoring backup job success to detect failures before they matter.

Backup verification includes periodic test restores to alternate environments, validating that restored data is complete and usable, ensuring backup archives aren't corrupted, and confirming that restoration procedures work as documented. Discovering backup problems during an actual emergency is too late.

Recovery Time Expectations: Understanding realistic recovery times prevents false expectations during incidents. Recovery time depends on data volume, restoration method, available bandwidth, system complexity, and whether recovery procedures have been tested. We document expected recovery times for different scenarios—file restoration, database recovery, complete system rebuilds—so you have realistic expectations when incidents occur.

Disaster Recovery Planning: Comprehensive continuity planning addresses various disaster scenarios—hardware failures requiring system rebuilds, security incidents requiring clean restoration, accidental deletions or corruptions requiring point-in-time recovery, or site-level disasters requiring failover to alternate infrastructure. Recovery procedures should be documented, tested, and maintained current as infrastructure evolves.

The question isn't "if" you'll need backups. It's "when."
Proper backup and continuity planning ensures you're prepared before disaster strikes. Contact us to implement verified backup procedures.