Why Your Customers Would Be Happier If You Charged More

Of course, one never feels like an expert, because part of being an expert is that one knows the names of some real experts, who are better than you. In this case, some real experts in MySQL backup work at Percona. Hire them. Alternatively, buy the O'Reilly book High Performance MySQL, which is partly the work of Percona's founders and has chapters about backups.

(If you are the foremost expert in a field, of course, you probably don't feel like an expert either, because you're at the frontier, where everything is confused and all the other experts are most lost than you. I don't understand this field! The references are irrelevant and confused and make no sense! I don't know how to make progress and I can't find anyone else who does! I must be really stupid!)

You may be surprised if you dig a bit.

One of the problems with selling software solutions is that so many companies don't understand that they need software solutions - because they don't understand what software can do.

To pick some examples from when I was dealing with that sort of client I've seen folk: * spending days every week manually copy/pasting email addresses into spreadsheets * manually adding name/address info to a 1k+ paper mail out campaigns * spending a monthly four digit amount to a print shop to do layout work that a basic template in Pages/Word could do.

... and none of those people understood that the addition of a piece of software - even an off the shelf piece of kit that just needs configuring - could take that pain away. It could save them hundreds, sometime thousands, of dollars a week - every week.

That's a difficult sell to businesses that are worried about short term survival.

Those clients really understand the value of their time. The tedious stuff that you can automate away is usually the stuff that is stopping them doing what they want to do. If you can show them ways for them to stop wasting time on things they are not making them money, and back that up with case studies / references, they will happily find ways to pay you.

But you have to show them the value first.

Back in 1999 when I started my first business my idea of sales was something like "I do X. I need to get really good at X. I need to find people who want X. Ideally rich people who can afford to pay more for X". Much like you this ended up with me wandering around various places going "Hi - I do X".

Having gone through.... some learning experiences... since then - and having seen some excellent sales folk do their thang I finally figured out that this is totally arse-backwards way of going about finding work.

You start by looking for people who have problems that you can solve. Ideally big problems that cost them lots of money/pain. Then you figure out how to get yourself to the same place as the people with that problem. Then you then sell them their life without that problem (and incidentally that you do X that can make that problem go away).

You don't network to let folk know that you're a developer looking for work. You network to understand other peoples problems, and to help them understand that they're solvable.

"If you got into this business to make peoples’ lives better, and you have produced something which will succeed with that, and you are aware of truth about reality such as “better marketed products beat better engineered products every single bloody time”, then you have an obligation to get better at marketing yourself."

Ghetto solution is to find a service that will allow you to rsync files to them and take care of offsite backups etc themselves. Once you have done that it's a simple case of setting up mysqldump to create timestamped .sql files and setting that up on a cron job to rsync to the remote server via SSH (you need to generate a key pair and copy the public key to the other end).

If you are using characters from weird character sets you definitely want to make sure all of your unicode settings are correct which may take some trial and error and I've never entirely trusted mysql in this regard.

If you are paranoid you should have a separate job that automatically downloads and restores your backups after a period of time and runs a few test queries on the data. Of course the hard part is knowing what the results of these queries should be.

Of course the problem here is that this will chew up increasing amounts of your remote storage over time, so it depends if you can afford to delete backups of over a certain age.

You can also enable binary logging in mysqld and do incremental backups by writing the binary log to the remote host at certain intervals (I think this only works properly with InnoDB databases), though I have no practical experience doing this because frankly I've never needed to. Nightly dumps were always good enough so my boss wouldn't want me spending any more time on it.

That's the crux of the problem with working for a non tech company, most of the time once the solution is "ok" it's time to move onto something else so you never get a chance to really kick ass which is what you need to do to justify a high rate.

These are really commodity skills though, you could have figured all of this out yourself by reading a few blogs (that's basically all I did). Alternatively if you had posted "Mysql backup solution needed" on eLance you would have probably had at least 20 offers to do the whole thing for $20 or so.