Managed DevOps – Without the Full-Time Hire
You have a product, a team of developers, and infrastructure that needs to just work. But hiring a full-time DevOps engineer is expensive and often overkill at your stage. That’s where we come in.
We act as your on-call DevOps team — managing your infrastructure, pipelines, deployments, and incidents — for a fixed monthly retainer. No ticket queues. No account managers. You get us directly.
What’s Included
- Server provisioning and hardening — Hetzner, Debian/Ubuntu or any other cloud provider and Linux distribution
- Docker and Docker Compose environment management
- CI/CD pipeline design and maintenance — GitLab CI, GitHub Actions
- Cloudflare configuration — DNS, WAF, DDoS protection, caching rules
- Monitoring and alerting — Nagios and Graylog for log management
- SSL, backups, and security patching
- On-call availability for incidents and emergencies
- Application environment support — Laravel, WordPress, custom PHP, Node.js or any other app
Who This Is For
- SaaS or e-commerce companies with 1–10 developers and no DevOps hire
- Agencies managing multiple client deployments
- Companies that have been hacked or had a major incident and want it never to happen again
- Teams migrating from single servers to containerised or cloud infrastructure
A Real Example
One of our longest-running retainer clients came to us after their servers were compromised. We cleaned up the breach, hardened the environment, and rebuilt their entire infrastructure on Docker with GitLab CI/CD pipelines. Three years later, zero incidents — and they’ve since migrated all their projects to us.
Pricing
Retainers are scoped to your actual infrastructure and workload. Typical engagements start from €700/month. Get in touch and we’ll scope it together — no sales process, just a direct conversation.
DevOps Retainer vs. Hiring In-House
Should I get a DevOps retainer or hire a full-time DevOps engineer?
If you have one Linux server or a handful of standard deployments, you probably don’t need either yet. Once your infrastructure spans multiple servers, containers, or environments — and something breaks at inconvenient times — that’s the point where a full-time hire starts to look attractive. Except a senior DevOps engineer in the UK typically costs £60,000–£90,000/year before National Insurance, pension, equipment, and the weeks it takes to recruit and onboard one. A retainer gets you the same level of hands-on expertise from day one, for a fraction of that cost, and you’re not carrying the overhead during the months when nothing needs fixing.
How is this different from hiring a freelancer for one-off jobs?
A freelancer solves the problem in front of them and moves on. They don’t know your infrastructure’s history, don’t have context on why a config is set the way it is, and you’re re-explaining your setup every time something comes up. A retainer means the same person maintains continuity — we know your servers, your deployment process, and your past incidents, so fixes are faster and less likely to reintroduce old problems.
What size company is a DevOps retainer for?
Mostly SaaS and e-commerce teams with 1–10 developers and no dedicated DevOps hire, agencies juggling multiple client deployments, and companies that have already been through one bad incident and don’t want a repeat. If you have an internal platform team of five or more DevOps engineers already, you probably don’t need us.
Do you work alongside our existing in-house developers?
Yes — this is the most common setup. Your developers keep shipping features; we own the infrastructure, pipelines, and on-call response underneath it. Most of our retainer clients have a small in-house dev team and no one dedicated to ops, which is exactly the gap this fills.
What happens if we outgrow the retainer?
Retainers are scoped to your actual infrastructure, so the scope — and the price — grows with you rather than requiring you to switch providers or renegotiate from scratch. If you eventually need a full in-house team, we document everything as we go specifically so that transition is possible without starting from zero.
What’s not included?
We manage infrastructure, deployments, pipelines, and incidents — we’re not a substitute for product development or feature work inside your application. If your application itself needs new functionality, that’s still on your development team (in-house or otherwise); we make sure what they ship actually runs reliably in production.
Get in Touch
📧 [email protected]
📞 +44 1288 255353
Or use our contact form — we respond fast.