Our support commitment
Everyone says 24/7.
Here is ours, in writing.
A promise you cannot check is not worth much. So: what we answer within, who picks up, how to reach us at three in the morning, and what happens if we miss. Hold us to all of it.
What we answer within
Response time means a human replying and taking ownership, not an automated receipt. How quickly depends on what the problem is costing you. A request for a new mailbox and a website that has gone down are not the same emergency, and you would not want us treating them as though they were.
| Severity | What that means | We respond within | When |
|---|---|---|---|
| Something is down Your website, your email, or a server is unreachable, or a security incident is underway | Work has stopped, or money and trust are being lost while it continues | 30 minutes | Any hour, any day, including public holidays |
| Something is degraded The site is slow, mail is delayed or landing in spam, a certificate is about to expire | It still works, but not properly, and it will get worse if ignored | 4 hours | Within business hours; first thing next morning if reported overnight |
| A request A new mailbox, a DNS change, a staff member leaving, a question | Nothing is broken. You need something done or explained | Same working day | If received before 3pm; otherwise the next working day |
How to reach us at 3am
Nobody in the middle of an outage should be hunting for a contact form.
What happens when you get in touch
A person picks up, not a rota
We are a small team, not a follow-the-sun call centre. The number reaches whoever is free, which in practice means someone who has already seen your setup, because there are not many of us and your account is not passed around.
Whoever answers owns it
The person who takes your call stays with the problem until it is resolved or deliberately handed to someone who can resolve it faster. You are not asked to re-explain it to a second person, and you are not passed to a queue.
You are told what is happening
For anything that is down, we tell you what we have found and what we are doing about it, and we come back to you before you have to ask again. You should never be chasing us for an update while your site is off.
You find out why it happened
Once it is fixed, we tell you why it happened and what we changed so that it does not happen the same way twice. "It is working now" is not a satisfactory ending.
If we miss it
You get a written explanation, not an apology
If we do not respond inside the times above, you receive a written account of what happened within two working days: when you contacted us, when we actually replied, why the gap happened, and what we have changed to stop it recurring.
You do not have to ask for it. If we notice before you do, it comes anyway.
You are better served by a number we always hit than an impressive one we quietly miss. If we ever start missing these times, you will see them change here. You will not be left assuming they still hold.
The part you never see
Most of the work happens before you notice
Answering quickly matters, but the best version of this service is one where you rarely need to call at all. This is the routine work that keeps it that way.
- Uptime monitoring
- Your sites and mail are checked continuously, so in most cases we are already looking at a problem before anyone reports it.
- Certificate and domain expiry
- Tracked and renewed ahead of time. An expired certificate turns a working site into a browser security warning, and nobody should learn about it from a customer.
- Security patching
- Operating system and control panel updates applied on a schedule, not in a hurry after an incident.
- Backups, and restoring from them
- Taken off-site and periodically restored to confirm they work. A backup nobody has ever restored from is not a backup.
- Mail deliverability
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC kept correct, and blacklists watched, which is the usual reason invoices quietly stop arriving.
- Capacity
- Disk, memory and traffic watched so that you are told to grow before you are forced to.
Ask us to prove any of this.
Tell us what happened the last time something broke and how long it took to reach a human. If we cannot commit to doing better, we will say so.