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Kevin Graham pays about $1,000 a month for 24/7 support and server admin across his web hosting portfolio. First response went from 18 hours to under 15 minutes, and nobody wakes him up for outages anymore. What he outsourced, what it cost, and what broke: 🧵

Kevin tested the support agency on smaller brands he had acquired rather than his flagship, so if quality slipped the tickets could move back in-house. Most outsourcing decisions are reversible, which is an argument for testing one earlier than feels comfortable.

The outsourcing that failed was development. A contractor with other clients gave him one or two days a week, and an outage once left a provisioning system down for 20 hours because he could not reach the guy. If you outsource engineering, hold your own code and servers.