About Tim Lizotte - FreeBSD Consulting

Background

I have been building and operating production infrastructure since the early 1990s. I started with network consulting -- designing and installing business networks -- before founding a dedicated server hosting company in the mid-1990s that I ran for nearly two decades. That company grew from 3 servers to 60+ production systems maintaining approximately 99.9% uptime, housed in colocation facilities with 1 Gbps fiber connectivity.

Along the way I rebuilt infrastructure from the ground up twice -- once after a facility fire and once after a lightning strike that destroyed half the servers. Those experiences shaped how I think about resilience, disaster recovery, and what it actually means to keep systems running when things go wrong.

Today I provide full-lifecycle infrastructure architecture, operations, and cost optimization for multiple clients. I currently manage 130+ production servers across five cloud providers supporting approximately 700 revenue-generating domains at 99.8-99.9% uptime.

Technical Expertise

FreeBSD & Unix Systems

FreeBSD has been my primary operating system for production work across multiple major releases. My FreeBSD experience includes custom kernel builds, ZFS storage architecture and ARC optimization, jails for containerization (iocage), pf firewall configuration and GeoIP filtering, bhyve virtualization, ports tree compilation via poudriere, and deep sysctl/loader tuning for performance. One of my production FreeBSD servers has logged over 2,899 days of continuous uptime.

Multi-Cloud Architecture

I architect and operate infrastructure across AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, GigeNET, and Cloudflare. My work includes multi-tier HAProxy load balancer clusters with SSL termination and active/passive failover, seasonal capacity planning for high-traffic events, and reserved-instance optimization. I have reduced client infrastructure costs by up to 71% through architecture consolidation and cloud migration.

Databases

I operate and optimize MySQL and MariaDB environments at scale, including a 2.4 TB MariaDB deployment with master/slave replication, query and index optimization, slow query analysis, and crash recovery at terabyte scale.

Automation & Monitoring

I build infrastructure automation in Bash, Perl, and POSIX sh -- everything from bot-blocking with automatic pf updates on failed logins, to SSL certificate expiration alerting, disk usage monitoring, Nginx log analysis, domain provisioning, and registrar DNS management via API. For monitoring I use Monit, Grafana, and Pingdom with custom alerting.

Web & Application Stack

Nginx and Apache performance engineering, PHP-FPM pool tuning, Redis/Valkey/Memcached caching layers, Varnish, and full web/mail/DNS service stacks (Postfix, Dovecot, BIND).

How I Work

I am a calm, methodical operator comfortable owning production environments end-to-end with minimal supervision. I work cross-functionally with CTOs, development teams, and business stakeholders. My approach to incidents is straightforward: isolate the failure domain, determine root cause, stabilize, restore, and prevent recurrence.

I am currently building proficiency in Ansible for configuration management and exploring AI/ML applications for infrastructure operations.

Published Work

I write technical articles focused on practical, production-tested FreeBSD and infrastructure topics:

Tim Lizotte