I'm a single founder as well, and here is what I've done: 1) Look into chef to automate 99% of your sys-admin tasks (setup, tear up, tear down, deployment) 2)

I'm a single founder as well, and here is what I've done: 1) Look into chef to automate 99% of your sys-admin tasks (setup, tear up, tear down, deployment) 2) Set up pingdom for monitoring your servers externally 3) Set up hoptoad (http://www.hoptoadapp.com http://www.hoptoadapp.com) to monitor for exceptions and errors internally with e-mail notifications 4) Set up a laptop with a MiFi for remote access - you're going to keep this in your car whereever you go (if you're in a city or something, set up VNC on an iPad or something and have access to a workstation where you can look into emergencies) The above will a) notify you of critical things happening and b) give you a way to act upon them. Thats pretty much all that you can do at this point -- and I'd look into Rackspace managed services to see if you can leverage them for basic system troubleshooting (this is on my ToDo list). By the way, we've got a single founder community going, its new and we're still getting to know eachother but it is great for moral support - let me know if you want to join.