Alternative to Strongbox...
 

or to contract with someone knowledgable of strongbox installations to maintain 14+ installs.

Chop, I've heard good things about Phantom Frog. http://phantomfrog.com/

Proxypass is good. Many people use it.

Ditto that- we're very happy with Proxypass

Chop I apologize for our customer service not being as fast as it could be.
I'll be taking care of your latest request this evening, but your post also
gave me an idea when you said:

As you know speedy customer service is NOT what we do best. I try
to take care of everyone ASAP but clearly I'm lacking in some of the
tools, skills, or knowledge of how to do that effectively. However we
have another company who resells Strongbox and probably provides
faster customer service, so I have contacted them to see if they would
be interested in taking care of any Strongbox related matters that you
may need assistance with. Their ticket system also automatically sends
a copy to me, so whichever of us was able to handle your ticket
the fastest would get you taken care of. We would pay them for any
"warranty" type work - support than we'd normally provide at no cost to you.
I'll email you after I hear from them, but if you'd like you can also contact
them directly at awsupport@gmail.com .

No thanks.
http://greenguysboard.com/board/showthread.php?t=18158

Ray, everyone loves Strongbox but if you're talking about sending email to AdultWebWare some of us have had terrible experiences with them. Like buying a script that doesn't work, never getting a customer number to actually use the support system and never getting a refund. At least that's what happened to me. If they're your only means of support then I don't think they're helping your business. I know I won't touch them ever.

I know AWW has had some problems of their own which I certainly hope
have been taken care of. I'm taking a very slow, careful approach with possibly
working with them on some customer support. As I mentioned, I would also
be notified of all tickets submitted through their system so I could keep
an eye on things and make sure that webmasters were well taken care of.
Certainly this is NOT a case where I'm just handing everything over to
them blindly. Rather, I'm looking at sharing a little bit of customer support
with them and seeing how it goes, then maybe expanding our relationship
a little more over time as I see that it works well to take care of our webmasters.

This is one of several possibilities I'm looking at, trying to find ways to improve
the promptness of our customer service without losing too much of the
"expertise", I guess you would call it, that is available to our webmasters
by having most of the customer service done by me personally, with a little
done by someone else here in my office. If any readers of this thread have
any suggestions for ways to improve customer service and support I'm all
ears, by the way. I'm sure that that are things that you do, "best practices",
or tools that some of you use that could help improve this situation and
I'm very much interested in finding ways to improve this situation.

I would write more on this topic, but I need to get my ass back on emails,
taking care of you guys. I have Chop and several other webmasters to take
care of before I go to bed tonight. Ok, now to go take care of Chop, Sue,
and Nina ....