I charge a flat monthly fee just to be available to resolve issues on the 6 days/week I am not onsite. Everything else is hourly. My billing structure doesn't change regardless of how many servers/PC's they have, like others here I have a $/hr when onsite and a lower $/hr to do remote work. For SMB's it's $200/mo. and I'll monitor backups, uptime, services for any number of systems. I then get paid hourly for work I have to based on the automated alerts or maintenance.
It's just playing with math at this point. If you figure 90mins/mo. for patching/maintaining one server (on average for 12 months, some longer, some shorter), but leveraging time (you can patch 4 servers almost as fast as one sometimes) that 4 servers is 180 mins, you can extrapolate that the first server is 90min/mo. but each additional server is 45 mins/mo. If your rate is nominally $50/hr it breaks down like this: 1 server = $75/mo, Each additional server is $37.50/mo. ($50/hr x .75hr). 5 servers = $240/mo. Add or remove time for administration and other monthly things you might need to do - user account management - come up with a time estimate and run the math. Checking backups, uptime, etc. should take very little time as you should get alerted when something fails instead of manually checking everything. Dave > Ok, > > but I still cant get an answer here, HOW MANY HOURS do you allocate per > server- > (i.e 1 hour per month, 2 hours per month, 5 hours ) > this is what i'm trying to get at > > I want to give a flat fee for normal mtc- > > > > Jean-Paul Natola > > > > >> Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2014 12:08:23 -0700 >> Subject: RE: [NTSysADM] SOT: mtc time >> From: [email protected] >> To: [email protected] >> >> For me there's no difference for charging for a virtual or >> physical....if >> they have 2 physicals that host 4 virtuals total, that's a six server >> fee. >> >> >> ------------------------ >> Let me rephrase >> >> Client: >> >> I have 5 servers that I want on mtc which includes monitoring/ensuring >> backups complete/and patching, how many labor hours? >> >> Anything else, (upgrades, new application install, hardware replacement >> etc..) is billed on per hour basis. >> >> Response to client: >> The server mtc is X hours per month per server. >> >> solve for X, >> >> and does X make a difference whether it physical or virtual? >> >> That is what I'm trying to gauge >> >> >> >> > >
