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, and none of it depends on me being there.
The three things that make the rest work
Nothing of yours 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, read access to the offsite copy 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, and no reason required. Each year is paid in advance; if you choose to leave, what you paid is not refunded. If I end it, or in the first year you leave because I kept missing the service levels, the months you paid for and did not get come back to you. During the notice month I write the handover document, walk your next administrator through the estate, and ship your data on drives that are yours to keep. The machine is mine and stays mine.
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.
I can no longer do the work
Your backup key, read access to the offsite copy and the documentation of how your estate is built are yours from the first day, so whoever you choose can rebuild it on another machine from the offsite copy, without me and without asking anyone. It takes days, not hours.
If you want a copy of your own as well, ask for it: every night an encrypted copy of your estate and the current documentation go to a place you choose — your office, your home, or storage in your name.
The business fails
Arasaka is a sole proprietorship, so there is no company that can fail separately from me. The worst case, said plainly: the machine is mine, and in an insolvency it is an asset of mine like any other. What protects you is not the metal. You hold your own backup encryption key, an offsite copy encrypted with it sits in another building, and you hold the documentation for how the estate is built — so it can be rebuilt by another administrator, on another machine, without that machine and without me.
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.
If what you are protecting is a household’s photos and papers rather than a company’s, the families page works through the same question in those terms.