Services
Infrastructure & Backup
Servers, clusters and backups designed so that failure is survivable and boring.
What you get
- Backup architecture with tested, timed restore procedures
- Disaster recovery plan with documented RTO and RPO targets
- High-availability cluster design and deployment
- Database architecture, tuning and replication (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis)
- Infrastructure migration with a rehearsed cutover and rollback plan
- Monitoring, alerting and on-call runbooks
Outcomes
- A restore you have watched work, with a known duration
- Single points of failure identified and removed or accepted deliberately
- Predictable performance under load instead of mystery slowdowns
- Infrastructure a second engineer can understand from the documentation
Capabilities
Backup and restoration engineering
Immutable and offsite copies, sensible retention, and restore drills that produce a real number for how long recovery takes.
Disaster recovery planning
Explicit recovery time and recovery point objectives per system, with the runbook and the cost tradeoffs written down.
High availability and clustering
Load balancing, failover, replication and health checking, designed so that losing one node is an event nobody has to wake up for.
Database architecture and performance
PostgreSQL and MySQL schema design, indexing, query tuning, replication and connection management. Redis for caching, queues and rate limiting.
Server and cloud infrastructure
Provisioning, hardening, reverse proxies, TLS, containerisation, and deployment pipelines on AWS, DigitalOcean or your own hardware.
Monitoring and observability
Metrics, logs and alerts that tell you what broke and where, instead of a dashboard nobody reads.
Infrastructure is judged on its worst day
Anyone can stand up a server that works on a quiet Tuesday. The engineering question is what happens when a disk dies, a region goes dark, a deploy goes wrong, or someone encrypts the file share.
We design for that day, and then we rehearse it.
The restore drill
The single highest-value exercise we run with a new client costs a few hours and changes the conversation permanently: we pick a production system, restore it into an isolated environment, and time the whole thing.
Roughly speaking, here is what that surfaces:
- Backup jobs that have been failing silently, sometimes for months
- Restores that technically succeed but produce a database missing recent writes
- Dependency ordering nobody had documented, so the restore works but the application does not start
- A recovery duration wildly different from what leadership assumed
None of that is exotic. All of it is better discovered on a scheduled Wednesday than during an incident.
What we actually build
Databases. PostgreSQL and MySQL schema design, indexing strategy, query analysis, replication, and connection pooling. Redis for caching, job queues, rate limiting and session state. We have run these under real production load on financial data platforms where a slow query is a visible business problem.
Clusters and availability. Load balancing, failover, health checks, and replication topologies sized to the actual cost of downtime rather than to a diagram in a vendor deck.
Pipelines. Deployments that are repeatable, reversible, and boring — because the most common cause of an outage is a change, and the best defence is a rollback you trust.
Monitoring. Alerting tuned so that a page means something. An alert that fires constantly is the same as no alert at all.
How this connects to security
Backups are a security control, not an IT chore. Ransomware is a recovery problem wearing a security costume — the attack succeeds precisely to the degree that your restore path is weak.
We treat the two as one discipline, which is why cybersecurity and infrastructure engagements here usually overlap.
Frequently asked questions
How do we know our backups actually work?
You restore one and time it. That is the only evidence that counts. We run restore drills into an isolated environment, verify data integrity, and give you a documented recovery duration you can plan around.
What is the difference between RTO and RPO?
RTO is how long you can afford to be down. RPO is how much data you can afford to lose. Every backup design is a tradeoff between those two numbers and cost. Most organisations have never stated either one, which is why their backup strategy does not match their actual risk.
Do we need high availability, or is a good backup enough?
It depends entirely on what an hour of downtime costs you. For many small businesses, a tested four-hour restore is the correct, affordable answer and clustering is overspending. We help you make that call with numbers rather than fear.
Can you work with our existing hosting provider?
Yes. We work across AWS, DigitalOcean, OVH, managed cPanel and WHM environments, and on-premise hardware. We are not reselling a platform, so the recommendation is based on your constraints.
Our database has gotten slow as we have grown. Can you fix it without a rewrite?
Usually, yes. The majority of performance problems we see come down to missing or wrong indexes, N+1 query patterns, unbounded result sets, and connection pool exhaustion. Those are fixable in place. We measure first and tell you honestly if the schema is the real problem.
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Contracts, trading automation, custody security, and wallet recovery done honestly.
Learn moreTell us what is breaking — or what you are trying to build.
You get a senior engineer on the first call, not a salesperson. If we are not the right fit, we will say so and point you somewhere better.
Active incident? Write “URGENT” in your message and we prioritise it.