Ad-Hoc Consulting

Ethos

    While we prefer building ongoing relationships, we appreciate that you sometimes need help "now-ish" and we're happy to show our expertise before you commit to a longer or ongoing arrangement. Full Services and pricing and other details below. The skills of our people and the reputation of our company is proven.

    There is no limitation of scope within the agreed realm (i.e., MySQL), so we don't charge extra for assistance with more servers, replication, or performance - aren't all questions essentially about performance, anyway?

     

    Services

    We offer consulting using email through our issue tracking system, instant messenging, SSH login, and sometimes over the phone, or on-site.

    MySQL is our speciality. All our engineers have extensive backgrounds in MySQL design, use, optimisation and application debugging. We recommend the (free) OurDelta and MariaDB builds of MySQL as they provide additional management and measurement instrumentation as well as performance benefits, however we will try to help you with any MySQL version and build; we have in-house expertise all the way back to MySQL version 3.23.

    Systems Administration goes hand in hand with database management and our engineers excel in both. This is generally limited to Linux based systems (any flavour), though we may be able to assist with other Unix based systems (depending on the scope of work). We're happy to provide general systems administration projects like infrastructure design, site migration and service enhancements. Our proficiencies also includes services that complement the web server ecosystem including Memcache, Sphinx, PHP APC, Puppet, Zabbix, Nginx and the Apache Web Server.

    Web sites are often optimised through changes that are outside the scope of the database. Because of our expertise we can often advise on non-database changes that increase the performance of your websites.

    Security consultancy is also within our available expertise. We can help you to mitigate specific threats, e.g. "I don't want my email database stolen" or advise you on your current security status "am I susceptible to any of the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilties?". With our systems administration experience we can harden servers from the outside; firewalls, HTTPS, remote access; through to the inside; logging, selinux, webserver and php permissions, authentication, and IDS.

    If you require an assessment against a compliance standard we can help. Security standards we are familiar with include PCI-DSS, ISM and OWASP AVAS though we are willing to service most other information security standards (they generally cover the same material).

     

    Getting Started

    To discuss your specific needs, just contact us now!

    We aim for a response time within the next business day, with all assistance given on a best-effort basis. Our focus is to help improve your setup so that emergencies are prevented. We prefer and prioritise our subscription clients rather than ad-hoc consultancy.

    Requests are initiated through our tracking system, and assigned to an available Open Query engineer. All correspondence including emails, phone call summaries, configuration, status and logfiles, gets attached to your request, and of course the time spent is recorded in this way as well. As Open Query has a distributed infrastructure, phone or Skype calls are generally initiated by the assigned Open Query engineer.

     

    Ad-Hoc Consulting Rates and Terms

    • Our pricing for ad-hoc consulting is simple, the rate is 150 per hour. We charge in one of the following currencies: AUD (excluding GST), USD, CAD, EUR at this base rate, so both you and Open Query are not subject by exchange rates. Generally we don't even convert internally, we just pay our engineers directly in their local currency.
    • We charge actual hours spent on you, rather than using complicated maths with corresponding higher rates. So, if you would like us to write up an extensive report on a particular project, that's simply charged at the (remote) hourly rate. So you know exactly where you're at, no funny business.
    • Scheduled on-site support is charged at 225 per hour plus travel expenses (car km or flight costs, accomidation).
    • Unscheduled rates are 300 per hours for business hours, 450 per hour all other hours. Availability not guaranteed (we greatly value our life outside work, and we prefer to focus on preventing fires rather than fighting them). Note: we only handle one emergency case per client, ever! You may come in as an urgent case, but we really don't want you to stay that way.
    • We will invoice you after the initial job, or after a sensible first period for a longer arrangement. You will pay promptly, or we may choose to not do further business with you. Yes, we do that, happy business relationships are important to us.