If something needs your attention, you are contacted. If it does not, you are not. Once a month you receive a plain-language status report. It tells you what happened last month: whether backups ran, how much storage is used, the health of the drives, and a summary of blocked DNS queries by category. Written for the owner, not the engineer. That is what managed means here.
δivergent Byte is a single-operator consultancy based in Islington, London. The operator — James Bacchus — has thirty years of commercial IT experience on the client side, most of it in senior roles carrying direct responsibility for production infrastructure at real organisations.
This is not a helpdesk. It is not a rotation of technicians working from a script. That has implications in both directions: you know exactly who to talk to, and the service is scoped to what one operator can maintain to a high standard — which is reflected in the client numbers and the defined scope of each product.
Read more: About δivergent Byte →
All routine management is performed over SSH from the δivergent Byte operations base. Physical access to the appliances is not required for day-to-day operation. For on-site work — installation, hardware replacement — a visit is scheduled.
The appliances report health, activity, and anomalies to the operator automatically. You do not need to initiate contact to get monitoring. It runs continuously.
OpenBSD and FreeBSD errata patches applied as part of the routine maintenance cycle — critical patches within twenty-four hours, standard patches within five working days. No subscription required for the patches themselves; the BSD licence is permanent.
Community-maintained public blocklists applied and updated throughout the service. δivergent Byte makes discretionary contributions to those maintainers in recognition of the work.
Delivered by email. Plain language. Covers backup activity, storage usage, drive health, blocked DNS categories. No login required to read it.
If a domain that matters to your business is being blocked, a request is handled within one business day.
If a unit needs replacing, the configuration and deployment of the new unit is included in the managed service. Replacement hardware and shipping are charged at cost. Commodity N150 hardware means a replacement unit is available from UK suppliers within twenty-four hours.
The managed service covers the appliances. The following are outside scope:
Your ISP connection and modem — not supplied or managed by δivergent Byte.
Your client devices — Macs, Windows machines, phones. Device issues — including those caused by macOS or Windows updates affecting backup behaviour — are outside scope.
Endpoint security — antivirus, MDM, device management.
Your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace tenancy — the appliances complement cloud productivity tools; they do not manage them.
Wi-Fi in coworking deployments — wired-only in coworking environments; Wi-Fi integration available for fixed premises on the Transparent Open Firewall.
Where a client issue falls outside scope and δivergent Byte is the appropriate person to help, that work is quoted separately at the standard consultancy rate.
δivergent Byte's monitoring architecture is designed to generate the minimum data necessary to operate the service correctly. Aggregate metrics. Drive health. Backup activity. Blocked DNS categories by volume, not by user. The monitoring does not produce user-identifiable browsing data by default.
Where a client requests statistics beyond aggregate categories — user-identifiable data, individual session logs — that is a separate, documented service extension requiring a signed data processing agreement. The client is the data controller. δivergent Byte acts as data processor under that agreement.
The answer is in the architecture. Every configuration is documented, human-readable, and under version control. The break-glass credential in your deed safe gives you — or anyone you authorise — full access to your own devices. The documentation describes every decision and the reasoning behind it. Any IT-competent engineer can read it and continue without rebuilding from scratch.
Your Finance Director insisted on data portability before signing the new finance system contract. Your infrastructure has the same standard.
Read: The FD Principle — why your infrastructure should work like your finance system →
A scoping conversation takes thirty minutes and produces a clear picture of what the right configuration is and what it will cost.
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