Who I am and what I do.

I’m Shafail Shafa, a freelance engineer working on PHP and MySQL systems and the Linux servers they run on. Most of my clients are small businesses, agencies and forum owners who do not have anyone in-house and need one person they can hand a problem to.

phpBB is where I go deepest. I have worked with it since 2013 and it accounts for roughly nine out of ten of my Upwork contracts. That covers upgrades from any version, boards that broke halfway through somebody else’s upgrade attempt, migrations in from vBulletin, MyBB and SMF, custom extensions for things phpBB does not do on its own, and styles built to match a client’s main site. One of those forums was a large board on a DigitalOcean instance that I set up and then maintained.

WordPress is the other half of the CMS work. I bring back sites that are down, hacked, or throwing errors after an update, remove the malware, close whatever the attacker came in through, and harden the site afterwards. WooCommerce stores too, usually when the checkout stops working. Beyond WordPress I take on Joomla, Drupal, Laravel and CodeIgniter, along with plain PHP and MySQL applications that somebody wrote years ago and nobody has opened since.

Migrations are a steady part of the work. I move websites, databases, mailboxes and DNS between hosts, plan the cutover so that visitors never land on an error page, and keep the old server answering in parallel until you confirm the new one is right. Email comes with it: mailboxes, MX records, SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

On the server side I do Linux system administration. Fresh VPS setup and hardening, LAMP and LEMP stacks, cPanel and WHM, Plesk, HestiaCP and CyberPanel, SSL, firewalls, fail2ban, automated backups, monitoring and performance tuning. When a server is already on fire that means 502 and 504 errors, disks that filled up overnight, mail landing on blacklists, and machines nobody can SSH into any more. The work has run from a single VPS up to a LAMP and REST API deployment on AWS for an enterprise client.

I also build self-hosted automation and private AI. n8n on hardened Linux with Docker, PostgreSQL, a reverse proxy and verified webhooks, and local model stacks with Ollama and OpenWebUI for people who want the capability without handing their data to somebody else. I run both on my own infrastructure, and I restore the whole thing onto a clean server before handover to confirm the backups do what they claim.

I work alone, from UTC+6, and most of the communication happens in writing rather than on calls. If you would rather talk it through, I am fine with calls and screen sharing, and I can shift my hours to meet yours.

Most of my work comes through Upwork and Fiverr, where the full review history is public and goes back to 2013. My Fiverr handle is dtyacf. You can hire me through either platform if you want escrow and milestones, or contact me directly.