Navigate by technical ability

Choose the level the named maintainer can sustain during an incident or holiday, not the level reached once during setup. Tool records use the five labels below; maintenance burden and workflow complexity still need separate review.

1. Trivial

Can sustain: ordinary web account setup, individual logins/MFA, simple settings, CSV export, and vendor support escalation.

• Prefer a small managed stack such as Solo Operator Hosted and Simple.
• Require a second person with documented emergency access.
• Still test exports, permissions, cancellation, support, and manual fallback.
• Browse trivial implementations.

2. Easy

Can sustain: managed-service administration, forms, simple automation, DNS records with guidance, role configuration, documented imports/exports, and routine troubleshooting.

• Keep integrations low consequence and visible to a human queue.
• Avoid self-hosting a critical database solely because installation has a one-click path.
• Browse easy implementations.

3. Moderate

Can sustain: command-line basics, managed hosting or controlled containers, DNS/TLS, logs, databases at an operational level, protected secrets, backups, isolated restores, and tested updates.

• Use starter packs in staging, not as production assurance.
• Assign weekly maintenance and quarterly recovery capacity.
• Browse moderate implementations.

4. Hard

Can sustain: Linux and networking administration, reverse proxies, mail delivery, identity/access design, monitoring, incident response, data migration, version-aware upgrades, and rollback under pressure.

• Require peer review, immutable image/version records, and off-host recovery.
• Price on-call and specialist labor against a managed alternative.
• Browse hard implementations.

5. Expert

Can sustain: complex distributed or security-sensitive systems, capacity/performance engineering, high-risk migrations, deep application/database recovery, threat modeling, dependency maintenance, and upstream/vendor escalation.

• Expertise is domain-specific; container skill is not accounting, privacy, accessibility, access control, or life-safety qualification.
• Prefer managed or specialist support when expert coverage is not redundant and continuously funded.
• Browse expert implementations.

If nobody can restore the selected arrangement and verify the business workflow afterward, move down a level, buy managed support, or defer. Use the buy/build/self-host guide to record the decision.