Thomas A. Limoncelli from Everything Sysadmin.com

Recommends Mihai Bocsaru and PRO IT Service

I was looking for someone to move my Movable Type installation to a new hosting service and upgrade it to the latest MT release at the same time. Even though I'm a professional system administrator, I had decided to pay someone else to do this work for me. Scratch that... it's really *because* I'm a professional system administrator I'm so busy I had to find someone else to do this if it was every going to get done. Doing this had been on my "todo list" for more than a year. If I went an entire year without finding a free weekend to do this work, it must be time to pay someone else to do it.

I wrote up a long list of exactly what I wanted done. I did it as a bullet list so that he could use it as a checklist as the work was done, and I could use it as a checklist to verify that all the work was done right. You can see the list here: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dhcf3bgs_43gs9d8hdt It is quite long and specific.

Mihai got to the project on the day he said he'd be able to get started. It took him about as long as he predicted, though we had a couple days of back-and-forth because some of the things I had specified on my list were not clear enough. The problems were mostly my fault. (I say that because I want to be clear that his English skills was not the problem.)

After the work was complete there were some follow up issues. "Captchas" weren't working properly (he fixed it quickly), plus I had some questions about how to do certain things like post a message to a tag without it appearing on the main page. Mihai answered my questions within 24 hours. In the future I would have documented a series of "use cases" that describe things I'd want to be able to do with the site.

What I liked is that Mihai has done this kind of upgrade so many times that he doesn't hit all the speedbumps that I would have hit. When I did throw some tasks at him that he hadn't doen before, he figured out how to do them. Since it was a fixed price contract, I wasn't paying him to learn new things.

The entire project took longer than I expected, mostly because Mihai had other high priority contracts at the same time. I didn't mind since I wasn't in a rush (and had told him so at the beginning of the project).

Initially I had him move the site to a different hosting provider, one that I had been accustomed to. However, the provider didn't handle certain things well and performance wasn't very good. Mihai had originally suggested this might be a problem and recommended I host the site with Peer, which he had more confidence. Alas, I didn't listen to him. When I finally gave up on that other provider it I had to pay Mihai a second time to move it to Peer. In hindsight, it would have been less expensive to just follow his original recommendation. I've been happy with Peer ever since.

Since I am a sysadmin by trade, I could have done this kind of work myself but I'm glad I paid PRO-IT to do it. I would have had to do the work on spare nights and weekends, neither of which are very abundant for me. By having him do the work I was able to spend those weekends doing more enjoyable things. It was like multiplying myself!

I'm happy with PRO IT and plan on using them for future projects.

Customer URL:
http://www.everythingsysadmin.com/

Customer from:
Bloomfield, New Jersey

Testimonial written on:
January 13^th, 2009