Standby & co-managed IT · Los Angeles

When your IT person is out, we already know your rack.

Coverage for studios running on one systems administrator — during PTO, during a resignation, during the week everything breaks at once. Prepaid blocks, no long-term contract.

Set up coverageCall 213-985-4442

Why we do this

We have been the bench for seventeen years

Most of the studios we serve run on one IT person. Sometimes half a person, shared with a producer who is good with computers. That works right up until the moment it does not.

We started getting these calls a long time ago and never advertised it. Someone's sysadmin takes two weeks in August and the render queue backs up on day three. Someone's IT lead gives notice on a Friday with a delivery the following Wednesday. Someone is finally taking a honeymoon and needs to know that if the Synology throws a drive, a person who has seen that exact array before will pick up.

What made it work was never that we are cheap or fast. It is that we already know the room — we racked the nodes, we imaged the workstations, we cabled the 10-gig, we sat the TPN assessment with you. There is no discovery phase and no ramp-up. That is the difference between a general MSP and the people who built it.

So we are naming it and pricing it properly, because it turns out being the standby resource is a service, not a favour.

When people call

The four situations

Planned leave

Vacation, parental leave, a sabbatical. Booked in advance, with a handover call so your person leaves knowing it is covered rather than checking email from a beach.

They resigned

The worst version, because it is usually sudden and the passwords are in someone's head. We stabilise first, document second, and help you hire without a gun to your head.

Overflow

Your person is competent and completely underwater. A buildout, a move, an audit, and the day job still has to happen. We take the project or we take the day job — your call.

Depth they do not have

Nobody is good at everything. Storage architecture, content-security assessments, 10-gig troubleshooting, render-farm scheduling. We fill the specific gap rather than replacing the person.

Pricing

Blocks, not contracts

Prepaid hours you draw down against, because committing to a monthly retainer for something you might need twice a year is a bad deal and everyone knows it.

Most common

10-hour block

$1,750 · $175/hr

Enough to cover a two-week absence for a studio that is running normally.

  • Remote and on-site in LA
  • Same-day response during coverage
  • Handover call before and after
  • No expiry
Better rate

50-hour block

$7,500 · $150/hr

For studios that would rather have standing coverage than call us each time.

  • Everything in the 10-hour block
  • Priority scheduling
  • Documented runbook for your environment
  • No expiry
Ongoing

Named coverage

Quoted · monthly

A named engineer who knows your environment, on a standing arrangement. For studios where one person is genuinely the single point of failure.

  • Defined response times
  • Quarterly documentation review
  • Included in buildout and audit work

Blocks are drawn down in 15-minute increments and do not expire. If we finish faster than expected, the hours stay yours. We will tell you when a problem is cheaper to solve by buying something than by paying us to work around it.

What we cover

Studio infrastructure, specifically

This is not general helpdesk. It is the systems a post house actually runs on.

Storage & project shares

Synology, QNAP, Thunderbolt arrays, permissions, snapshots, the drive that failed at 2am.

  • Array health & rebuilds
  • Backup verification
  • Archive & restore

Render & scheduling

Queue management, node health, licence servers, the job that has been at 94% since Tuesday.

  • Farm scheduling
  • Node provisioning
  • Licence troubleshooting

Network

10-gig switching, VLANs, firewalls, the intermittent fault nobody can reproduce.

  • 10GbE & fibre
  • VLAN & routing
  • Firewall & VPN

Content security

TPN and MPA-aligned practice, isolated environments, access control and audit trail.

  • Assessment support
  • Isolated project networks
  • Access review

Who covers you in August?

If the honest answer is nobody, that is worth a fifteen-minute call before it becomes a Tuesday-afternoon emergency.

Set up coverageCall 213-985-4442