Background services that run for years, unattended, without falling over.
A background service is easy to write and hard to make reliable. The difference is everything you cannot see in a demo: logging, monitoring, graceful recovery, and back-off on the failures that will happen. We build Windows Services and background workers that run continuously for years without manual restarts, and we fix the ones that crash silently. Integration workers, schedulers, queue consumers, and Linux daemons too.
Most background services are written for the happy path and break on everything else.
- A service that crashes silently at 3am and nobody notices until something downstream breaks the next morning.
- No logging and no monitoring, so when it does fail there is no way to tell why.
- A worker that hangs or leaks memory over weeks until it quietly stops processing.
- No retry or back-off, so one transient network blip takes the whole thing down.
- A critical service written by someone who left, running on a server everyone is afraid to touch.
Services built for the failure cases, not just the demo.
- Structured logging and health checks from day one, so the service is observable and you can see what it is doing.
- Graceful shutdown, automatic recovery, and back-off with retry so transient failures self-heal instead of cascading.
- Monitoring and alerting so you hear about a problem from an alert, not from an angry user downstream.
- Modern .NET worker architecture that runs as a Windows Service or a Linux daemon from the same codebase.
- Full ownership of source, installers, and runbooks. No black box, no single point of tribal knowledge.
What a Windows Service engagement covers
Worker Architecture
A clean .NET Worker Service or hosted-service design with proper lifecycle handling, configuration, and dependency injection.
Scheduling and Triggers
Cron-style scheduling, queue consumption, file watchers, or database polling, whatever drives your workload.
Logging and Observability
Structured logging to Event Log, files, or a central store, plus health endpoints and metrics for your monitoring.
Failure Recovery
Retry with back-off, circuit breaking on flaky dependencies, and automatic recovery so transient errors do not become outages.
Integration and Messaging
Connections to databases, APIs, and message brokers like RabbitMQ or Azure Service Bus for reliable, decoupled processing.
Deployment and Handover
Installer or deployment scripts, service-account setup, documentation, and a support window after go-live.
How we run a background service project
Discovery
We map the workload, the triggers, the external dependencies, and every failure mode that matters, because those failures are the real spec.
Architecture and Prototype
A working worker skeleton with logging and recovery in place, proving the reliability model before the business logic goes in.
Build and Instrument
The full service, fully logged, monitored, and resilient, with the integrations and scheduling your workload needs.
Deploy and Handover
Installer, service-account and permissions setup, runbooks, and handover so your team can operate it with confidence.
The stack we build long-running services on
Reliability comes from architecture and observability, not from a framework logo. We use what stays up.
.NET Worker Service
The modern foundation for background workers, hosting the same logic as a Windows Service or a Linux daemon.
Serilog and structured logging
Observability that makes a running service diagnosable instead of a black box.
Quartz.NET and schedulers
Reliable cron-style scheduling for time-driven jobs and recurring work.
RabbitMQ, MSMQ, Azure Service Bus
Durable, decoupled message processing so work is not lost when something restarts.
SQL Server and PostgreSQL
Transactional state and job tracking for services that must not lose or double-process work.
Health checks and monitoring
Liveness and readiness signals so your monitoring knows the service is alive and keeping up.
Also comfortable with
Windows Service questions we get asked
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Learn moreHave a background service that keeps falling over, or one you need built right?
Tell us what it has to do and where it runs. We will tell you honestly what a reliable version looks like. Fourteen years of shipping software other firms turn down, including the unglamorous services that just have to keep running.