Before you buy an AI receptionist
The demo will be excellent — they always are. Eleven questions that tell you whether it will still be working in six months, and an honest account of where the running costs actually come from.
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NTS/ — Writing
Notes.
Things we've learned doing the work, written down properly. Useful whether or not you ever hire us — and if a note saves you from needing to, that's a good outcome too.
Low-code automation: where it pays, and where it quietly becomes debt
Zapier, Make, n8n and Power Automate can remove real drudgery in an afternoon. They can also leave you with a business process nobody understands, owned by someone who left. Here's how to tell which one you're building.
Monitoring that tells you something
Most small infrastructure is either not monitored at all or drowning in alerts nobody reads. What to collect, what to alert on, and why every notification you ignore makes the next one less useful.
The first hour on a new server
A hardening baseline for a public Linux host — what to do, in what order, and why each step is on the list rather than the dozen that aren't.
Your NAS is not a backup, and other things nobody tells you
RAID is not the redundancy you think it is, a NAS on the internet is a ransomware target, and the snapshot feature you already own is probably your best protection. Getting shared storage right in a small business.
You are probably paying for software you don't use
How subscription spend accumulates without anyone deciding, the audit that finds it in an afternoon, and the honest arithmetic on replacing a tool with something custom — which is usually the wrong answer.
Your flat office network is the security problem
Most small offices run every device on one subnet. Here's what that actually costs you, and what a segmented network looks like when you're a 12-person business, not a bank.
Your cloud firewall rules probably don't do what you think
A hardened VPS with correct iptables rules can still expose a port to the internet. Two layers of firewall, plus Docker rewriting one of them behind your back.
The three DNS records that decide whether your email arrives
SPF, DKIM and DMARC in plain language — why your invoices land in spam, and why anyone can currently send email as your company.
A backup you haven't restored is not a backup
3-2-1 in practice for a small business, why sync is not backup, and the one test that tells you whether any of it works.
Mesh VPN has quietly replaced the office VPN box
WireGuard-based mesh networking removes the concentrator, the port forward, and most of the support calls. What it's good at, and where it doesn't fit.
A deploy pipeline that refuses to ship known-vulnerable images
Scanning container images in CI is easy. Making the scan a gate without it becoming noise everyone ignores is the actual problem.
What a small business website should actually cost to run
Hosting a fast, secure business site costs a few hundred rupees a month. Here's where the money genuinely goes, and which recurring charges are worth questioning.
Why the Wi-Fi drops in the back half of your office
Adding another router is the wrong fix. Channel overlap, AP placement, band steering, and the survey that takes an hour and saves a re-purchase.
CTA/ — Questions
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