Comment by kls

I don't do production support on freelance development jobs. Even if I have to sub the hours to one of my associates, I always have a gatekeeper, that being said, when I design systems the only way to get to production is via automation, e.g something gets promoted to a prod branch in github, and production automation kicks off a backup and then applies said changes. The trick is to have a gatekeeper and never have open access to production. It's easy even as a one man shop. Git automation and CI are simple with tools like GoCD and other CI tooling and only take a day or two to set up, faster if you are familiar with them.