Plain answers to what we get asked.

One company takes responsibility for your technology working, for an agreed monthly fee. In practice that means every machine monitored and patched without you asking, backups running and actually getting restored to prove they work, security watched, the whole setup written down and kept current, and somebody to call when something stops — all of it included rather than quoted job by job.

The word doing the work there is responsibility. It is not a support contract that entitles you to phone someone. If a server is undersized, a backup has not been restored in a year, or a licence is about to lapse, finding that and dealing with it is our job — not something you are expected to know to ask for.

It also changes who carries the risk. Paid by the hour, a bad month is expensive for you. On a managed agreement it is expensive for us, which is why the quiet months get spent preventing one.

Break-fix means you call somebody when something is already broken and pay them by the hour to come and fix it. Managed means you pay a fixed monthly fee and it is their job to stop it breaking in the first place.

The difference that matters is who loses when things go wrong. On break-fix, a bad month bills well for them and badly for you, so nobody is paid to spend a quiet Tuesday checking whether your backups actually restore. On a managed agreement that same bad month costs them their margin, which is the only reliable reason an IT company will do the boring preventative work.

Break-fix is not dishonest and it is not always the wrong answer — for a very small office with two laptops and no server, paying by the hour is often cheaper and perfectly sensible. It stops making sense at the point where a day of downtime costs you more than a month of cover.

One agreed monthly number, quoted for your business. We do not publish a price list because the honest number depends on how many people you have, how many sites, and what is actually on the network — and a published figure would be one you had to argue your way out of.

What we will not do is quote you cheap and make it back on tickets. There is no hourly rate hiding behind the monthly one. See how the plans compare for what sits in each tier.

Included: monitoring, patching, the help desk, security, backups and their testing, documentation, and the vendor chasing when one of your suppliers has to be escalated to.

Not included, and billed at cost rather than marked up: hardware, licences and third-party subscriptions. They are yours and stay in your name. Big projects — an office move, a server replacement, a migration — are quoted separately before they start.

The monthly number covers running the place. It does not cover rebuilding it, and anyone telling you otherwise is pricing for a rebuild you have not had yet.

If the business has stopped, thirty minutes to respond. If somebody cannot work, two hours. Everything else is same or next business day depending on what it is, and we tell you which one we called it when we open the ticket.

Responding is not the same as fixing, and we will not pretend otherwise — but you will be talking to somebody who already knows what you run rather than reading your setup back to you. The full list is on the support page.

That is your call, not ours, and both answers are normal.

Plenty of businesses keep the person who knows the building and hand us the parts that need watching around the clock — monitoring, patching, backups, security. Others are at the point where one person cannot cover it any more, or that person wants to stop being on call, and we take the lot.

What we will not do is turn up and start finding fault with whoever has been holding it together. Usually they have been doing a reasonable job with no budget and no time.

We are built for roughly ten to seventy-five people with no IT department — big enough that a day of downtime is real money, small enough that hiring a full-time IT person does not add up.

Below that, an agreement often is not worth it to you, and we would rather say so than sell you one. If that is where you are, tell us anyway and we will point you at what actually helps.

Weeks rather than days, and none of them should cost you downtime. Onboarding is inventory first, then changes, and anything genuinely disruptive is scheduled outside your working hours — evenings, or whichever day you run light.

The first thing that happens is that we walk the building and write down what you actually have. You get that document whether or not you go ahead with us, and nothing gets changed until you have seen it and agreed what happens next.

You do not need your current provider’s cooperation for most of it, which is worth knowing if that is the thing holding you back. It is easier when you have it, and it is not a blocker when you do not.

A named person with their own account, not a shared login the whole company knows. Access is removed when somebody leaves us, and we can tell you who has what.

It is a fair question and you should ask it of anyone you are considering, including us. An IT provider is a supplier with standing access to everything, which makes us part of your risk rather than only your defence against it. There is more on how we handle that on the security page.

No. A backup job reporting success means the job finished, not that what it wrote can be turned back into a working system.

The only test that counts is a restore. Ask whoever manages your IT when they last restored something from your backups, and what they got back. If the answer is vague, that is your answer.

You take them with you. Every account, licence and domain is registered in your name rather than ours, and the documentation is yours, so another provider can pick it up without starting from nothing.

We would rather keep you because the service is good than because leaving is painful. A provider who holds your domain or your licences hostage is telling you something about how confident they are in the first one.