/services
Infrastructure Sanity Pass
A practical review of the systems you rely on before they become expensive gremlins. A focused, second-set-of-eyes pass over your infrastructure — what's solid, what's fragile, and what's worth fixing first.
A practical technical sanity check, not a formal audit, pentest, or compliance engagement. See “What this is not” below.
Who this is for
This is aimed at people running real systems without a dedicated infrastructure team behind them.
- Small businesses running on a stack nobody fully owns anymore.
- Founders who inherited infrastructure and aren't sure what's holding it together.
- Homelab and self-hosting folks who want a second opinion before scaling up.
- Builders whose infrastructure grew organically and got a little messy.
- Teams whose deployment path quietly lives in one person's head.
What I actually look at
A focused sweep across the things that tend to cause real outages, lockouts, and 2am surprises.
DNS
Records, registrar access, expiry, and the misconfigurations that quietly break email or TLS.
Hosting & deployment
How code actually reaches production — and what happens when the person who set it up is unavailable.
Backups
Whether they exist, whether they're tested, and whether you could genuinely restore from them.
Monitoring
What you'd learn before your users do — and what currently fails silently.
Access boundaries
Who can reach what, leftover accounts, and where least-privilege has drifted.
Secrets handling
Where credentials live, how they're shared, and what's sitting around in plaintext.
Single points of failure
The one box, account, or person everything quietly depends on.
Update & patch posture
What's running out-of-date, and how updates happen — or don't.
Network exposure
What's reachable from the internet that probably shouldn't be.
What you get back
A clear picture and a plan you can act on — not a 90-page PDF nobody reads.
- A prioritized list of findings, written in plain language.
- Clear risk levels so you know what's urgent versus merely untidy.
- Quick wins you can knock out the same week.
- A “do this later” list for the things that can safely wait.
- Optional architecture notes if a bigger rethink would genuinely help.
Scope
What this is not
Being clear about the edges matters more than sounding impressive.
- Not a penetration test or active exploitation of your systems.
- Not a legal, compliance, or certification engagement (SOC 2, ISO, HIPAA, and friends).
- Not a guarantee that nothing will ever break — no honest review can promise that.
- Not the implementation itself — it's the map and the priorities; I can help build the fixes separately.
Related reading
Where this thinking comes from, and how I handle access when we work together.
Security & Infrastructure Review
The broader review this is a focused cut of — adds security, access, and operational risk across the whole stack.
Private Cloud / Homelab
A real self-hosted build — containers, networking, PKI, and backups done deliberately.
Trust & boundaries
How I handle access, data, and security boundaries on an engagement.
Resources
Free, lightweight checklists — including infrastructure-flavored sanity lists.
Practical infrastructure overview
The broader architecture-and-operations model behind this focused review — how dependable systems stay understandable, observable, and recoverable.
Next step
Think your stack could use a once-over?
Tell me what you're running and what worries you — the messy version is fine. We'll figure out whether a sanity pass actually helps before anything formal.