I agree with Mike about everything he said, and especially about, "in general, there seems to be an inverse proportionality between how good they are and the number of certifications they have. What's important is not what they know, per se, but how good they are at figuring out how to solve problems, especially during an emergency situation."
I manage 250 servers professionally for the largest non-municipal (NYSE:PSD) power company west of the Mississippi and north of San Francisco. And when we screw up, the lights potentially go out over a third of Washington State.
When we're hiring - and I know, because I'm the person who is the first person to read the incoming resumes - the LAST thing we care about is what certifications someone has. In fact, certain certifications actually count against you, or having too many certifications. It tells me you're fluff, and not work.
The one thing we care about most is what actual experience someone has in a large datacenter, with demonstrated competency running projects and software similar or identical to ours. If they don't have at least two years with at least 50 servers, we toss the application right then.
After that, we're especially looking for three things: 1. the ability to deliver the goods no matter what (accountability/ownership), 2. the ability to see the big picture, as in, after appropriate training, could the other senior team members all go on vacation for a month, and know that when they come back, things will still be running and everything will be okay? Can they/will they always speak truth to power? (integrity/responsibility), and 3. and this is always a deal-breaker, do they fit really well into OUR existing team. There are only 8-10 of us at any given time on the operating systems team. We have each other's back. In the past, there have been a couple of times when we've hired someone who didn't quite fit in or thought s/he was too good for the rest of us; we now take exceedingly great pains to pick real team players.
A great sysadmin makes up for a lot of failures in the datacenter. Not to say you don't want to choose a good datacenter to host your server. But if you don't have chemistry with the team who is going to host your server, I'd look elsewhere.
Caroline mentioned earlier - https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=171458 - that she's moving a site from ETP to BCMS this weekend. That's the site I'm producing. We'll be going live later this evening, so in the next day or so, Caroline and I will announce what we've been up to the past 2.5 months, and invite y'all to come take a look.
In the meantime, I can tell you that I host the site at www.zill.net, and I've been very satisfied with Patrick Giagnocavo's service and performance.
