Who I Am
I have spent my entire career keeping production systems running. I got my start in the early 1990s building business networks, then founded a dedicated hosting company in the mid-1990s that I operated for close to twenty years. Over that time I scaled it from a handful of machines to 60+ production servers with 99.9% uptime, eventually migrating the entire operation into a major colocation facility on 1 Gbps fiber.
I have also had the experience of rebuilding production infrastructure from scratch -- twice. Once following a facility fire, and once after a lightning strike took out half the hardware. Those events taught me more about disaster recovery and operational resilience than any certification ever could.
Currently, I architect and operate infrastructure for multiple clients under long-term engagements. That means 130+ production servers across five cloud providers, roughly 700 revenue-generating domains, and 99.8-99.9% uptime maintained around the clock.
What I Bring to the Table
Cloud Architecture & Cost Optimization
I design and manage infrastructure across AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, GigeNET, and Cloudflare. My work spans multi-tier HAProxy load balancing with SSL termination and active/passive failover, capacity planning for traffic spikes, and reserved-instance strategies. I have delivered infrastructure cost reductions of up to 71% through consolidation and migration planning -- taking a client from dedicated hosting to a unified AWS architecture with load balancers, a Redis cache cluster, and replicated databases.
Unix & BSD Systems Engineering
I run FreeBSD and Linux in production and have done so across multiple FreeBSD releases. My hands-on work includes custom kernel builds, ZFS storage management and ARC tuning, jail-based containerization, pf firewall and GeoIP filtering, and deep sysctl/loader optimization. I maintain one FreeBSD server that has been running continuously for over 2,899 days.
Database Operations
I manage MySQL and MariaDB at scale -- including a 2.4 TB MariaDB deployment with master/slave replication, index and query optimization, slow query analysis, and crash recovery. When a database fails at terabyte scale, I am the one diagnosing it.
Automation & Tooling
I write infrastructure automation in Bash, Perl, and POSIX sh. That includes automated bot-blocking with pf integration, SSL certificate monitoring, disk threshold alerting, Nginx log analysis, domain lifecycle management across registrar APIs, and deployment systems built on rsync. For monitoring, I work with Monit, Grafana, and Pingdom with custom alert pipelines.
Web & Application Infrastructure
Nginx and Apache performance tuning, PHP-FPM pool optimization, Redis/Valkey/Memcached caching, Varnish acceleration, and complete mail infrastructure (Postfix, Dovecot, BIND).
Working Style
I work directly with CTOs, engineering leads, and business stakeholders. I am comfortable owning production environments end-to-end and operating with minimal oversight. My incident response approach is simple: isolate the failure, find the root cause, stabilize, restore, and make sure it does not happen again.
I am currently expanding into Ansible for configuration management and applying AI tooling to infrastructure operations workflows.
Technical Writing
I publish practical, production-tested infrastructure guides:
- Nginx Performance Tuning Checklist
- Server Monitoring Setup Guide
- SSL/TLS with Let's Encrypt & Nginx
- Which Server OS for Your Infrastructure