#  Self-Sufficient Solutions: Building Trust with Clients 

 

It has come to my attention that several sites I built while working for ECTISP have been taken down. Let it be known that I have not been an employee of theirs since February of 2010 and I no longer have any contact with them.

I feel bad that they're down - I like to build lasting solutions. But there isn't anything I can do about it. The sites I currently maintain are still online. The fact that their former clients contacted me means the outages caught everyone off guard. That's the difference between owning your infrastructure and hoping someone else does.

## Owning the Stack

When I left ECTISP I was managing the entire network infrastructure and maintaining 27 radio towers six days a week - solo. It was unsustainable, and leaving forced me to figure out what I actually wanted to build.

The answer was simple: everything. DNS, servers, backups, [email](/blog/development/one-sh-tty-email-that-made-me-finally-do-something-about-spam "One Sh*tty Email That Made Me Finally Do Something About Spam"), [security](/blog/personal/why-my-joomla-extensions-are-free "Why My Joomla Extensions Are Free") - if my clients depend on it, I own it. Not because I couldn't outsource it, but because I've seen what happens when you do and something goes wrong at 2am. Someone has to answer that call. It might as well be the person who built the thing.

## What Clients Actually Need

I'm not looking for projects - I'm looking for problems worth solving. The clients I've kept longest are the ones who wanted a partner, not a [vendor](/blog/hosting/ai-browsers-turn-users-into-spies "AI Browsers Turn Users into Spies"). They didn't need someone to execute a spec; they needed someone to tell them when the [spec](/blog/development/scorm-shenanigans-part-deux "SCORM Shenanigans - PART DEUX") was wrong.

That's a different kind of [trust](/white-hat-seo/quality-content "Quality Content"). It takes longer to build and it doesn't fit neatly into a contract. But it's the only kind worth having - and it's the only kind I know how to provide.

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