If I stop
You are buying a service from one person. The reasonable question is what happens when that person is not there — and the answer cannot be that I am very reliable.
This page is the mechanism. It is deliberately arranged so that the worst case, my death, needs no cooperation from me at all.
The three things that make the rest work
Nothing is in my name
The domain, the registrar account and every licence are yours, bought with your money. There is no account of yours that I would have to release, because I never hold one.
You already hold the keys
Your backup encryption key and your vault are yours before anything goes wrong, not handed over afterwards. You can restore your own data without me on any day of the contract.
It is standard software
Every component is named on the stack page and maintained by somebody other than me. There is nothing here that only I can operate.
Because of those three, replacing me is a handover rather than a rescue. Everything below is a variation on that.
Each way it can end
You fire me
30 days’ notice either way, no penalty and no reason required. In that month I write the handover document, walk your next administrator through the estate, and ship your data on drives you keep. The machine is yours to buy at its written-down value or to have wiped to your satisfaction — your choice, stated in the contract rather than negotiated at the end.
I am ill or unreachable for a while
Monitoring, backups and every service keep running: they do not need me to be awake. What pauses is change — new accounts, new services, anything that needs a decision. If I am unreachable for more than 72 hours without having told you, treat it as the case below and use the escrow.
I die, or I am incapacitated
A sealed envelope sits with my accountant, who is named in your contract along with their address and telephone number. It holds the administrative credentials for your estate and the physical access instructions for the machine. It is released to you, and only to you, on proof of my death or incapacity — you do not need my family to find anything, understand anything, or agree to anything.
Your own copy of the documentation and your backup key mean you are not waiting on that envelope to keep operating. It exists so that you can take physical possession of the machine, which is the one thing your keys cannot do for you.
The business fails
Arasaka is a sole proprietorship, so there is no company to become insolvent separately from me — and no administrator who could treat your hardware as an asset of a failed company. The machine is identified in your contract as your property from the day it is paid for, which is what keeps it out of any such argument.
What I will not pretend
There is no second engineer on a rota. If you need somebody reachable at four in the morning every night of the year, one person cannot honestly sell you that, and the service levels say so plainly.
What I can offer instead, and will name in your contract if you want it, is a second administrator of your choosing — your own IT person, or one I introduce you to — who holds the same documentation and can be granted access by you at any moment, without asking me.