Question 1

What does the monthly fee actually cover?

Accepted Answer

It covers a defined scope written into the contract: the systems under monitoring, the patching cadence, backup verification, an agreed number of support hours, and incident response within agreed hours. Anything outside that — new features, redesigns, migrations, a third-party integration you decide to add — is quoted separately so the retainer does not quietly become an unlimited promise. We would rather have an argument about scope on day one than every month afterwards.

Question 2

What counts as an emergency, and how fast do you respond?

Accepted Answer

We define it with you before signing, and the usual line is simple: the site is down, checkout or payments fail, data is at risk, or a security issue is live. Those get an immediate acknowledgement and work starts as soon as an engineer is reachable within the agreed coverage window; everything else is queued into the normal cadence. We are a small team and do not pretend otherwise — if you require guaranteed sub-hour response at three in the morning, you need a rota larger than ours and we will say so.

Question 3

Do you offer 24/7 support?

Accepted Answer

Automated monitoring runs continuously and will alert us at any hour, but human response is scoped to hours we can honestly staff. For most SMEs that is the right trade: continuous detection, plus a documented rollback or failover path so that the automated response covers the first minutes. If your business genuinely cannot tolerate overnight downtime, we will design the system to fail over automatically rather than sell you an on-call promise we cannot keep.

Question 4

Do you need access to our servers and accounts?

Accepted Answer

Yes, but as named users under your ownership, never as a shared password. You create accounts for us with the minimum permissions the work requires, and you can revoke them yourself at any moment without waiting for us. Production database credentials are treated separately and used through least-privilege roles, and we log the reason for any direct production access.

Question 5

Can you work with our existing hosting provider?

Accepted Answer

Usually yes. We work regularly with Vercel, managed PostgreSQL such as Neon, and conventional VPS or shared hosting from local providers, and we do not require you to move to be a client. Where the current setup is the actual cause of your problems — no staging environment, no backups, no way to deploy without editing files on the server — we will say so and price the alternative, but moving is a recommendation, not a condition.

Question 6

How do you handle backups, and how do you know they work?

Accepted Answer

Schedule, retention period and recovery point are agreed against how much data you could afford to lose, then verified by restoring into an isolated environment on a defined interval and checking that the restored data is actually complete. We also document who can trigger a restore and how long a full one takes, because during an incident nobody wants to discover that answer for the first time.

Question 7

What happens to our data and access if we leave?

Accepted Answer

Nothing is held hostage, because it was never ours to hold. Domains, cloud accounts, repositories and databases are in your name from the start, so ending the contract means removing our user accounts. We hand over the runbooks, the monitoring configuration, the inventory document and a written summary of open risks, and we will brief your next provider.

Question 8

Who is responsible when a third-party service causes the outage?

Accepted Answer

We are responsible for detecting it, telling you what is affected, applying whatever mitigation exists and chasing the provider — but we cannot fix another company's platform, and we will not pretend an upstream incident was ours to prevent. Where a single third party is a genuine single point of failure, we flag it during onboarding and propose an alternative or a degraded-mode fallback so the whole site does not fail with it.

Question 9

Is this only maintenance, or can you build features too?

Accepted Answer

Both, but tracked separately. Keeping the platform healthy and building new functionality compete for the same hours, so mixing them into one number is how retainers quietly stop delivering maintenance. Development work is quoted and scheduled on its own, while the managed-services scope stays protected.

Question 10

How is this different from the managed hosting our provider already sells?

Accepted Answer

Managed hosting looks after the machine — the operating system, the web server, sometimes the database process. It does not know whether your checkout is broken, whether a dependency upgrade introduced an error, or whether last night's backup contains complete data. We monitor and maintain the application and its data, and we are happy for your hosting company to keep doing their part underneath.

How can we help?

Managed Services
FAQ

Helpful
information

Getting Started

Timeline

Pricing

Support

Still have questions?

Managed ServicesFAQ

Helpfulinformation