NYCPHP Meetup

[Tamar]

A question for those who are developers/designers and who maintain client sites and provide hosting:

I have the option of taking on a group of Joomla! sites that have maintenance contracts. For a monthly fee, the expectation is that updates will be applied to the core and installed extensions, client questions will be answered, and that the sites will be hosted in a best practices manner including applicable security measures, whether that's on a VPS or in a shared hosting environment.  

My question is - what are your solutions for systems administration? If you build Joomla sites as a designer or developer, how do you manage 
system administration for your long term support? Do you do it yourself, hire someone with a system administration background? If you hire someone for sys admin, have you ever done that through Elance, Odesk, etc.? I wouldn't need a full time person.

My main concerns are moving the sites over from where they are to a new environment, creating an easy way to create a cloned dev environment for 
each site that can easily be pushed live (for testing extension and 
core upgrades), possibly creating an extension upgrade process that 
will work on multiple sites at once (one click upgrades JCE, for 
example, on 6 sites), and an initial security audit and ongoing 
security maintenance. 

I use akeeba backup and can backup and recreate sites, but I am looking 
for a better/more automated way to manage dev environments. 

Thanks