Critical Issue Infrastructure Support Policy
Introduction
Doubleplusgood's aim is always to ensure your infrastructure set-up recovers automatically from usual traffic peaks or general server failure; however, unforeseen issues can occur, and this policy handles how we respond.
We always aim to be flexible with our customers, increasing and decreasing our billed hours as required by ongoing projects, maintenance or any urgent issues. We know our customers appreciate this, but customers who do not actively maintain their infrastructure are more likely to have critical issues, so when their systems are left unmaintained, we must limit the support we provide them.
We are a small company; therefore, there will also be periods when we will have no resources available to help you, such as when multiple customers have urgent issues simultaneously, people are on annual leave, or during the Christmas or Easter periods in the UK.
We must prioritise issues because we can only respond to a certain number of customers simultaneously.
Prioritising Issues
The following factors are taken into account when prioritising issues:
- The severity of the issue
- The estimated amount of time it will take to resolve the issue
- If the customer pays their invoices on time
- The revenue received from the customer in the last three months.
For example, if we have critical issues from two customers and estimate one will take ten minutes to resolve, and one an hour, we would fix the ten-minute issue first.
While deciding whether an issue is critical is up to you, the final decision on our priority is ours alone.
Out-of-Hours Issues
Our usual working hours are 9 am to 5 pm, Monday to Friday, excluding UK Public Holidays. We avoid out-of-hours support arrangements because if our advice is followed and the changes we advise implemented, such arrangements should not be needed.
Of course, some customers have existing infrastructure, older setups, and computers go wrong, so if you need out-of-hours support, we offer the following:
Customers who qualify for "best efforts" out-of-hours support
In short, customers who pay for thirty or more hours a month qualify for out-of-hours support.
For a customer to qualify for out-of-hours support, we will have billed them an average of thirty or more hours a month over the previous three months. We offer this to support the customers who are actively having their systems maintained by us. If infrastructure is not maintained and updated, it will eventually go wrong.
If a customer does not meet this requirement, out-of-hours support is unavailable unless they pay an out-of-hours support retainer.
An out-of-hours support retainer must be paid in advance on the first of the month with a Direct Debit via GoCardless. It will be the equivalent of a minimum of thirty hours a month. The time not used for ongoing maintenance, updates, or out-of-hours support can be scheduled for other things, but it will only roll over to the next month if agreed upon in writing.
Our payment terms are strictly net 14, and customers with overdue invoices will not qualify for out-of-hours support.
"Best efforts"
We offer "best efforts" out-of-hours support for qualifying customers. If someone is awake and available, they will try to fix the issue for you. Please note that a fix could be delayed until the next morning or later in the day, depending on various factors such as availability or having the correct access, such as for systems which lock down access to specific IP addresses.
SLA-based support
SLA-based support is only available for customers with their infrastructure actively being worked on; e.g. SLA-based customers must already qualify for "best efforts" out-of-hours support. Each agreed SLA will be specific to the customer's requirements, likely based on their SLAs, and priced according to the response times required.
Document version: 1.1
Last review date: 17/11/2023