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Brief Overview of my IT Background

Qualifications

Bachelor of Arts, University of Queensland, 1980
Bachelor of Design Studies, University of Queensland, 1984
Graduate Diploma in Computing Science, Queensland University of Technology, 1992

Major Companies

Queensland State Department of Works
Media Five Architects
Geac Australia Pty Limited
IBM Printing Systems Division
IBM Australia
IBM Global Services
Salmat Australia Pty Limited

Company Projects

Amex | ANZ | BankWest | Crawford Technologies | Dialect | NAB | Optus | ATO | CBA | Elders | GE | HSBC | ING | MLC | NIB | WBC | Linfox | Qantas | Bankers Trust | Suncorp | Telstra | Integral | HIC | IBM | Dairy Farmers | Wesfarmers | Entertainment Distributors | Cox Mowers | Marrickville Library | Macquarie University Library | Hotels | Sony | P&O | and more…

IT Skill Sets

Modems | Routers | RS232 | Cabling | Printing (Mainframe, AS/400, SCO Unix, IBM RS6000, Windows) | IBM OnDemand | IBM AFP | SCO, SunOS, AIX, Red Hat, AWS Linux, Ubuntu, Debian | Installing/Maintaining Software Applications | Disaster Recovery | Technical Support | Critical Situations | and more …

Job Roles

Technical Assistant, In-country Specialist, Solutions Architect

Some Major Projects

Qantas outsourcing | BankWest transition from Australia Post | AMEX statement printing & advertising | ANZ Consolidation proposal | Australian e-mail / bills proposal | NAB NextGen printing | Optus Mobile e-mail statements | ING Taiwan proposal | and more …

Overview of Website and Photography Clients 2012 to present

Photography

Get Active Physiotherapy | Royal North Shore Hospital | Jennings Financial Services | O&M Private Wealth Advisors | Health By The Bay | St Andrew’s Cathedral, Sydney | Golden Grove Accommodation | Forum Pharmacy | O’Loughlin’s Medical Pharmacy | Jimenez-Natoli Family, Studio Photography

Website Industry Segments (to date)

Psychology | Food Catering | Art Works | Finance | Trades Software | Church | Health Life Style | Copy Editing & Publishing | Photography | Technical | (Small Online Shops)

Websites

Axon Clinical Psychology & Neurology | PS Editing | East Gate Enterprises | Redbox Catering | Andrew J Smith Art | GILMI | John Rigby Art | Get Well’n Stay Well | New Timeline 8 | St Augustine’s Hamilton | Clayfield Baptist Church | Shaw Safe | Linux support: My Personal Loan Broker, MySmartMove
Website or App Support with Small Biz Web Solutions – e.g. MySmartMove, My Personal Loan Broker

Hosting for Websites and Applications

() no longer actively supported for installation, but able to transfer from
Amazon AWS EC2: Linux, Debian, (Centos, Rocky) | (Lightsail: Ubuntu) | Akamai/Linode: Debian | VentraIP, Synergy Wholesale, (Crazy Domains, Go Daddy, HostPapa): cPanel
Domain Management: Amazon AWS Route53, VentraIP, Synergy Wholesale, Cloudflare, (Webcity/Netregistry)

I was in the IT industry over 25 years, providing business communications solutions with ASX listed companies. This afforded direct access to a wide range of staff and resources, designing, developing and delivering small to large scale projects. Solutions Architecture and Design provides end-2-end analysis and services without gaps and inappropriate risks, deploying Business Principles and IT Standard Practices, looking to your interests.

I invested my time in Amazon AWS Hosting services for friends and clients from 2012 on – many learning curves – to develop expertise in reliable project delivery on an Enterprise/Government quality platform, leveraging this for better website and app deployment/presentment for smaller concerns such as individuals or small business, as compared to the existing and commonly used retail services I had previously used.

My view is that serious websites need to benefit from a strong platform that provides a dedicated IP4 address on a VPS – Virtual Private Server, as these benefits are unobtainable on typical cPanel services and usually out of scope. The reason we do not see more of this approach is due to limited skill sets provided to the general public. Having been in all manner of IT, including mission critical and problem solving situations, I am able to offer this service. AWS services are priced similar (or at times, lower) to the often recommended cPanel services that use shared systems and IP addresses which affect reputation and performance.

Generally, I provide clients an EC2 t4.micro instance (2 vCPU, 1 GiB Memory) running Debian 12 or Linux 2023, using ARM Architecture and 12GB GP3 Disk.

This configuration usually outperforms other services that market 2 vCPU and 2 GiB Memory. High performance is achieved through “burst” CPU, dedicated IP4 address, ARM architecture with GP3 disks, Nginx with memcached & opcache, and php8.3 – as at time of writing. The smaller t4.nano instance is good for development or small, low demand sites.

All WordPress sites should use a caching plugin. Geographically distributed sites may use a CDN. Various WP Plugins and Themes reduce performance or even freeze while using theme options or editors on smaller systems. 3rd Party shared services using cPanel may experience chronic resource limits when using multiple WordPress sites and domains by comparison, forcing clients to a higher cost compared to the t4.micro architecture. cPanel services may have random performance drops (your site goes slow) or impacted IP address reputation (blacklists) depending on what other shared clients are doing. Shared IP addresses take longer to process data content. Compared to IP4, IP6 performs at lightning speed, but no viable transition has taken place in the industry for the Internet and  Email.

All projects involve Domain Name System (DNS) management. Some familiar names I work with are Cloudflare, Amazon Route53, VentraIP, Webcity, Go Daddy, and Crazy Domains. There are specific technical requirements to transfer domains to ensure no loss of the domain name or incurred penalty. All projects require SSL certificates, either free from Let’s Encrypt (certbot) which requires configurations and scripting on Linux, or paid certificates such as from Comodo or Sectigo which are renewed and unfortunately re-installed annually.

Each client is unique. We review for an allocation of time and a single price, considering domain management or transfer, email setups, the build and transfer of the website, as well as “tier” – e.g. for individuals or business. A good reference is one to three days of work at $250 (no GST) per day or about $35 per hour. You would provide login access to key services such as email, hosting, SSL certificate provider and domain registrar. All existing work is backed up. We need ability to create the DNS CAA record for SSL certificates. If this is not possible, we transfer to another registrar.

Often I discover a client’s existing web service has let something slip through the floor boards – understandable. For example, emails need DMARC authentication which often goes missing, including absent configurations on major exchanges such as MS Exchange. Or, a service accepts email that takes too long to send and receive. I check the completeness of each project, which may be extra time at my expense as I CAP the costs and care about my clients having what I understand as the best. Transfers are not vulnerable to unknowns and price variations, but as an example of variation, if a WordPress site was never updated over five years, it is likely it needs to be updated and modified before using new software and current security.

New work uses an Amazon “snapshot” for disaster recovery. I provide automated crontab shell scripts to make database and file backups to a secure, low cost Amazon S3 (cloud) storage, added security configurations for the server, country blocking as agreed, and automated monitoring on the server. Your Amazon system is reviewed for security updates, or major upgrades as price and frequency of maintenance is agreed with you. All services may be transferred to another party at any time, or sunset if required. There are no issues on who owns what and when.

More complex configurations such as a different server for the database, balanced/distributed load, RAID disk are not supported on the sizing and types of web services indicated here. There is no support for builds on Amazon Lightsail, only transfers away.

Depending on situation, Akamai/Linode Debian 12 x86 architecture builds are an option. Whilst I know how to configure LightSPeed, I now only use Nginx, or sometimes Apache2 (or Amazon httpd). I have experience rebuilding from legacy systems, or installing out-of-date systems due to coding dependencies. I am able to build standard services in VentraIP Australia with cPanel if that is a preference. All systems require email as part of the end-2-end solution that we design.

Amazon pricing is “On Demand” – what you use is what you pay, with an annual discount option on hardware. Pricing is converted by Amazon from USD to AUD inc. GST.

A typical price (as at November 2024) is AUD $11 per month plus annual discounted hardware fee of AUD $95, a total of $230. Without the annual fee, an additional $13.20 per month, for a total of $290. The pricing became higher in 2024, as Amazon now charges for the use of your dedicated static IP4 address. Your server is located in Australia. Servers outside Australia have data security concerns, and handshakes between the user on their browser and the overseas server may be unacceptable to performance analysis and Google Search Engine. E.g., why would you handshake from Canada? There are no commonly accepted and enforced industry best practices and standards around web services. Using Amazon means you control the services on an Enterprise data center platform with strong internal regulations and practices.

By comparison, one provider only recently added a VPS service at $300 per year with servers outside of Australia. A shared cPanel service is $275, which in my experience will be impacted when adding multiple domains or subdomains – the fix would be next level up at $360 per year. For years I have worked on 3rd Party providers’ platforms and am fully aware of the types of problems that arise, even on VPS services. Here are some experiences – a typhoon hits another country, and no services or support is available at that critical time. A provider places the WordPress database on another server, even in another country, which doubles the risk for point of failure – typically unable to establish a connection as a common error.  A provider simply removes a service with no regard to the work it took you to build the service. A provider moves your service to different hardware (even older) without notifying you. A provider markets almost 100% uptime, but the reality is not the case, and there are no metrics and penalties to ensure uptime. A provider lets down their guard during maintenance, a virus infects your website and causes it to be shut down. Help Desk support is superficial, and not provided for critical situations. Some providers in my experience have tried to lock people into their service, such as making it near impossible to install your own SSL certificates. Some have blocked users from configuring adequate PHP values required by WordPress such as memory.  All of these frustrations are removed with Amazon AWS services, and VentraIP cPanel services.