8:00 AM - 9:00 PM on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday.
8:00 AM - 12:00 PM on Wednesday.
8:00 AM - 5:00 PM on Friday.
Midnight Tech is an information technology shop with a CompTIA Security+ Certification. Your home and business information security needs are easy for us to support because of our vast knowledge and 20+ years of experience. We provide in depth security assessments and audits. If we find security risks and changes are needed we document and provide that information. We will quote the implementation of a security plan to mitigate the risks we have identified. This is where corporations get into the most trouble. They simply do not recognize the importance of layered security and regularly scheduled security audits. Being prepared before a security concern arises will save your business 10's of thousands of dollars that would be lost to downtime, a hit on the reputation of the business, crypto payments to ransomeware hackers, lawsuits, and in many cases fines by governmental agencies. It is expensive to do business and succeed. But you could lose that business if you ignore security concerns. Simple things like out dated equipment and un-trained staff that are susceptible to social engineering attacks could ruin your day. Be assured you are in good hands with us. We are honest, dilligent, and detail oriented. Schedule your security audit today.
Midnight Tech provides technology equipment sales and service for businesses and homes. We provide cellular internet fail-over. We set up mesh wireless networking. We maintain printers and printer supplies. We perform repairs to cell phones, laptops (all), tablets, computers (all), and servers (linux and microsoft). We offer cabling support to install, replace, or find network, phone, fiber or coaxial cabling issues.
We plan, design and administer services for your business. Some of the things we handle are internet domain name administration, TLS certificate maintenance, VMWare, and office technology infrastructure such as DNS, Email, Website, Active Directory, Nextcloud, Azure, AWS, and backup storage servers. We perform migrations to and from cloud services. We configure VPN's.
We provide design and delivery for letterhead, business cards, vinyl, and signage.
We do a lot of things in house and we have relationships with other businesses for times when we need to augment the product offerings to speed your order along.
Script engines, their associated application languages, and a database can be used for a wide variety of needs. Through database interfaces automated work flows reduce human error, improve data quaility, and comunicate situations in real time through the UI, text messaging, SNMP software, and through email. Data is stored centrally for multiple types of contacts. Such as customers, vendors, sales, warehouse, and delivery. Every business has a supply chain and logistical needs. The need for billing, internal processes for payroll, procurement, production, and shipping are universal. IBM is a big provider of some of these systems. They have a corner market. They are built on UNIX and support use a variety of scripting technologies and databases. IBM's platform is very flexible and it is a proprietary system IBM owns and sells.
These systems age. Market trends change. Gasoline becomes expensive and deliveries cost more. Security concerns abound as entire coroporations are brought to their knees by nation state hackers with ransomware and social engineering attacks. Walgreens, kaseya, and so many more corporations have been attacked and their databases were sold by criminals. HaveIBEENpwnd.com has a nice list of events to look over and a place for you to see if you were one of the compromised contacts in someones hacked database.
My point is that applications and databases must be programmed with security being their primary objective. Companies who use them must also keep a security plan which involves maintaining security and training staff to recognize and avoid threats. If the vendor of your system tells you to upgrade because their support is no longer available do to the age of your hardware or software, you should be doing that. Otherwise, you will begin to suffer functionally as some companies currently are in their efforts to find alternate solutions. You also will be exposed to the inherent security risks associated with your aging infastructure and applications.
Business application development is a big task and must be kept secure. The data needs to remain confidential, it must have integrity, and it must be available to those who need it. Further more, those who use the data must be held accountable for what they do with it. Yet, here we are. We have aging ware house servers and technology moves along. New security requirements occur and entire systems that warehouses use become obsolete over night because of new regulations that resulted from the last big attack on a major company of your choice.
We program applications in multiple scripting languages such as C#.NET, PHP, Powershell, Perl, Phython, Javascript, VB, VB Script, VB.NET, and HTML. We integrate applications with databases such as Oracle, DB2, SQL, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.
Our approach is to begin planning from the perspective of business function. We study how a business functions and determine how best to store the data. With that worked out we then look at the needs of every entity that is involved and their process of involvement with that business. From this we determine the user interfaces, permissions, functionality and delivery of data with security being our leading objective.
Refreshing an application is a common task in todays world. Today this applies to web based presences in the form of facebook, wordpress, joomla, square space, etc. Generally speaking, nearly everyone uses the least expensive method to get their message out to the world. This is fine. Perhaps it should not have been so expensive to begin with. People should help one another fairly.
Refreshing may also apply to an internal application such as the ones warehouses use. Most warehouses are using the very same technology providers. They just dont know that. The provided platforms go in the same way and then are customized to fit each different warehousing company.
Whichever best represents your situation, we can help you. I do not pretend to be able to cut over an enterprise IBM system to something Midnight Tech and its afilliates would try to develop over a short period of time. However, given a clean slate and some data we can help.
Primarily, we want to control the application in terms of how it is hosted isolating it from third party maintenance routines. Patching and script engine upgrades do affect applications. Liniux, PHP, and MYSQL are the open source selection for a lot of companies. Shared hosting environments are problematic and require actual web developers and people with database knowlege to maintain. Some of the companies offering shared hosting charge for this service and keep it in house. Now we have Application as a Service provided by companies like squarespace. They require you give them DNS record ownership while you use their service. There are some things you simply cant do and they of course have a montlhy fee you will pay. It may be simple to use squarespace if your pocket book is happy and you dont have a lot of need for functional data driven applications.
Template decisions: We build websites from widely available reactive templates. Reactive websites change their formatting to fit your devices screen as ours does. There are as many templates available as there are stars in the sky. Once you have made a selection we discuss the forms you will use (contact, registration, order forms, ...), and the types of data you would like to make available to the public. Some just want a landing page that displays basic information. Others, like florists, want to integrate with FTD or have a custom designed site. The choice is yours and anything is possible.
Development and Review During development we will have you review the your product and provide your thoughts as we move forward. Good communication is everything. You can provide us with word documents, pictures, lists, and textual content in any form you choose. You are delivering to us the very essence of your web presence. We will reach completion quickly so long as you are actively involved and easy to contact. So many have been seen that say, "Yes lets build a website". Yet, when a situation arises where we need clarification and that individual or organization is unresponsive, we will simply stop working because no one responds to our requests. We will do what we can. At times we may take liberties to get you completed, however, we must ask that you remain very involved in the process. Other companies that offer DIY solutions box you into formats and technologies that leave you enslaved to their companies through a monthy support plan. We only charge for the work we do. Not for retaining our willingness to help you as so many others do. Upon the completion of your website you will have the tools to maintain and modify it easily yourselves. You can call us to make modifications. Plesae understand, it is not our end goal to tie you into a binding relationship of all or none. EG. If you stop paying you must find a way to then take ownership of your developed site and host it elsewhere. Understand that many of these companies will claim ownership over your site and its content. They will leave you with no website and no access to it should you not maintain their monthly contract. This is why reading the end user licensing agreement and privacy agreements are so important. You need to realize the power of owning your own content maintaining complete control and rights to that content. Contrast that ownership and control with the perceived ease and speed of delivery at the cost of losing rights to your own content for the simplicity of services. We would recommend you keep control of as much of your proprietary information as possible.
Hosting and Publishing Finally, you will choose where to host your site. You are no longer limited to looking for a hosting provider. Now you have the choice to host it in your own data center, to leave the hosting where it is, or to move your site to a new host. There are subtleties to each choice. After this decision is made we will verify your SSL Certificate at your chosen host is present and up to date. We will migrate the database and your completed project. We will verify the outgoing mail server is present in your MX records and that mail from your web forms is working.
Whether your project is large or small we can help. Please do not hesitate to call for a FREE consult regarding your website.
What does it cost for a FREE 15 minute on site consult? It costs you nothing. Our consulations are free of charge unless the mileage rule applies. You set up an appointment. Before we travel we confirm and if it is a long ride (>30 miles) we discuss .40 / mile. We arrive and discuss the issue you want addressed. We offer you possible solutions and their related costs. At this point your only expense if we traveled more than 30 miles is mileage. If it was a short drive you still are in the free zone.
You said yes. I have finals in two weeks. We grab the pc and go to the office. Notice there was no charge for the pickup. We call our suppliers find the best deal and order in the equpment. Your hard drive goes into the the recovery process. Luckily we get a complete image of the hard drive. (45 MIN)
Two business days later your new computer comes in. We image it. Then we begin repairing your "OLD" image which we put onto the new computer (5 MIN). Strangely, it was windows 8. So we had to cascade upgrade that to windows 10. We adress the license issue and it is digitally activated. ($75 license) (2 HOURS)
We call you and explain that we are nearly finished and begin planning for a delivery date.
After our final checks your computer runs clean, it looks just like it used to except now you have new computer hardware, your OS is up to date, your original software is still present and works. (30 MIN)
Your delivery occurs. We arrive. We come in and install the computer. It hooks up just like the old one because you agreed that you wanted to continue that way. We connect it to your router and make sure your printer works. You had some questions. With everything finished we generate your bill. (one hour).
Hardware |
Cost |
Labor |
Quoted Time (Minutes) to hours. |
Cost |
Computer |
$400.00 |
1st Hour |
60 |
$70.00 |
License |
$75.00 |
Recovery |
45 |
$37.50 |
Discounts |
-$75.00 |
Install HD |
5 |
$4.16 |
|
|
Cascade UPGRADE |
120 |
$100.00 |
|
|
QC Review |
30 |
$25.00 |
|
|
Delivery Appt. |
60 |
$50.00 |
Totals |
$400.00 |
|
320 Minutes |
$286.66 |
Our Actual Cost |
$686.66 |
|
5.33 Hours |
|
However, bench time is bench time. Not labor. We have to adjust so you are billed representative to the actual amount of time we "labored". That does not include time watching things churn. AS you are aware, computers are slow. They take their time. We have to baby sit and hit buttons now and then. So we may come and go from the work many times. But we left it and came back to check it. It is important to us to bill only for time that we were working at the bench on your equipment. It is un-ethical to do otherwise. You have probably been abused by many a technician in this regard. From what we have seen they charge more. $100/hour. ETC. Some treat you with disregard. This is why Midnight Tech was created. Because. As a college student, I Patrick Barnes was taken advantage of by a local IT shop. I think an honest approach to technology service is needed in our area. Wouldnt you agree?
The actual time to perform the cascade upgrade is 45 minutes. It is one step because windows 8 upgrades directly to windows 10. Actual billed number in the scenario will be:
Hardware |
Cost |
Labor |
Billable Time (Minutes) to hours. |
Cost |
Computer |
$400.00 |
|
|
|
License |
$75.00 |
Recovery |
45 |
|
Discounts |
-$75.00 |
Install HD |
5 |
|
|
|
Cascade UPGRADE |
45 |
|
|
|
QC Review |
30 |
|
|
|
Delivery Appt. |
60 |
|
Hardware Total |
$400.00 |
|
185 |
|
Total Actual Labor |
$132.15 |
|
3.08 Hours |
|
Tax |
$30.00 |
1st hour = $70 Additional hours = $50 Partial hours are billed by 1/4's of an hour. |
3 HOURS 15 MIN... |
|
Grand Total |
$562.15 |
|
|
|
End result. You had a free pickup. We correctly determined you needed a hardware refresh. We chose for you matching architecture so it would go back in the way it came out. We used our methods to safeguard your data and your loaded applications. We delivered it. Answered your questions and made sure everything worked after we put your computer back into service. You were billed honestly.
Interestingly, We do not spend millions of dollars on marketing. We depend on word of mouth. You are sent an email with your Individual Customer Sale attached as a PDF. It shows the charges, your payment, and our notes. The email will contain content similar to our business card to include a link to the appointment page (above) and our cutomer review page (under blog). We will always try to leave business cards when we leave and we will always ask for you mention us to your friends.
Warranty: If we fix problem that comes back within 30 days of your payment you should call in in. We will analyze the problem again and look at our internal notes. If the issue is something that could have been fixed but wasn't because of errors for whatever reason you may receive warranty labor. We will schedule a time to come back and try again on our dime up to the original amount of labor we billed and you paid on the issue.
Midnight Tech Began in 2003 and became S-Corporation a few years later. Our customers love what we do for them. Our focus has always been to provide effective and affordable solutions. We do everything through appointments. You may call us or make an appointment using the appointments page. Please be as detailed as possible when you schedule your appointment.
If you call in and get our voicemail please press pound (#). That will skip the 45 second greeting.
Does Midnight Tech have an office or a building where I can visit? Yes and No. We do not have a public store front. We work out of a private office and we rarely bring customers into our office because it is not designed for customer visits. We will some day in the future. There is something specific we are looking for that we will not compromise upon. When we find it we will publish the location of our office.
Where can you drop off your computer? Please set up an appointment. We prefer to do a pick up. This service is free of charge if we travel less than 30 miles to your appointment. If you live about an hour away we can meet you half way. This is still free! We charge 40 a mile for travel greater that 30 miles in one direction.