There’s been a lot of discussion over whether hiring a remote DBA is really a win in the long term. Many people seem to think it’s not, but it really depends on how it’s done. If you’re supplementing your internal team with some expertise that you wouldn’t be able to hire or keep on your own staff, it can make a lot of sense. In our experience, a lot of companies can benefit from this type of relationship. Imagine that you’re a business who relies upon MySQL but doesn’t have huge racks full of servers — say, a car dealership. You don’t need to have a rock star on your staff, and chances are you can’t afford or find someone like that anyway — but it sure helps to have such a person available when needed.
Our pricing structure makes a lot of sense, too. No artificial roadblocks to try to force you to buy a package deal. No lock-in. No pressure to get per-server licensing. (Consider this. If you want your servers to run as efficiently as possible, would you hire someone who gets paid by the server?) Just by-the-hour, a-la-carte consulting, with the option to get onsite or other types of help if you want. This isn’t without its tradeoffs — in particular, you have to be an active participant in scheduling, since per-hour scheduling is less tolerant to slippage than having someone onsite for a whole day. But on the whole, it’s remarkably efficient.
We also align our compensation with your goals. We set things up so that serving you best is the same as serving ourselves best. You don’t have to rely on our nobility or altruism to goad us towards doing the right thing. We love the satisfaction of a job well done, but even without that, the financial incentive is for us to do what’s best for you.
Companies like other companies (we’re not the only ones) are disrupting the old models, which have a lot of silly lock-in and other things that just don’t serve the customers. There is plenty of fish in the sea. Everyone’s looking for help, and it’s hard to find. Why go the route of the lock-in, with the corresponding disincentive for improvement? Every efficiency we add helps us help more customers more quickly and better. So what if we’re “working ourselves out of a job?” It’s not as if there’s any scarcity of jobs!
We’re quite a bit different from other “remote DBA” companies. We are full-stack performance optimization experts — we work on a lot more than MySQL. You can think of us as performance Ninjas if you wish. But whether you’re hiring a Ninja or a remote DBA, you should look for an approach that values your interests equally with the consulting company’s. If you’re considering remote DBA support and you want to know whether it’s worth it, just ask us. We’d be happy to give you some satisfied customers as references.
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