Support Policy

Support Services Policy

Overview
Level One
Level Two
Level Three
Level Four
Level Five
Support Service Prioritisation
Dedicated Support

The Hosting Shop provide a range of self managed services for it's customers and clients to use, these services are generally supplied with a manual and or a knowledge base for you to read to solve common issues and answer questions you may have relating to the services made available for you to use.

Where our customers and clients are unable to resolve an issue relating to usage of our hosting services The Hosting Shop provides free and paid support services to help you get the best from your package. Some people ignore free advice, some never even ask or look for some before they start, some just don't have the time and some just hoped.

The Hosting Shop provides a ticket based support service for all customer and client support or requests not covered by the manual or knowledgebase which is available 24 hours a day. All support requests must be made using our ticketing system. All tickets opened by customers start in Level One.

Our aim with a level one ticket is to acertain the actual need or issue relating to the ticket content and where possible resolve the ticket within 10 minutes of opening.
We may request further clarification to help resolve your ticket, any reply and subsequent responces to tickets must be made by logging in to the ticketing system.

Important Notes:

• Email's recieved from you by way of reply to our automated support and update email notifications do not help support staff immediately track and monitor your ticket progress through the support system. Emails are handled by admin staff monitoring a different system with different billing policies and you may be charged an admin fee to get emails transferred or associated to open support tickets. This may also cause a delay in solving any issue you are having..

Where it is determined that any ticket will take take longer than 10 minutes to resolve it will be raised to Level Two for further action.

All support requests will be responded to within 24 hours with the exception of Sundays and bank or public holidays.
The Level One support service team are available during office hours which are Monday to Friday between 9AM and 6PM.
Level one support requests are monitored during the weekends and bank holidays.

This is part of your free level of support

Level Two Support staff can provide technical functions and services relating to your hosting account. Thier primary role is to help you access your account and or services. While level two staff are capable of configuring your control panel and making basic tweaks to websites to get them working (and would be happy to help you) we ask you remember we are providing you hosting services and some requests you make will fall outside of the free support we provide all of our customers.

Where it is determined that resolving a ticket will require one or more paid services or more than 20 minutes to resolve and is considered by us to warrent ongoing free support status we will either;

raise a quote and send it to you. Once you accept a quote we will raise an invoice and send that to you. Work on your ticket will begin once the invoice is paid and your ticket is raised to a Level Three action request, or;
raise your ticket to level four as an issue for further monitoring or research.

The following indicates what services may be dealt with at what levels and costs.

Basic Support Rate is £60.00 (sixty) per hour or part thereof

Types of L3 services available : issues up to 24 hours, Control Panel Config, basic php/mysql installations, basic page or code tweaks, ongoing tickets, basic research, look-ups, starting back-up awareness.

Types of L4 services covered : L2 Esculations, issues up to 48 hours, DNS, local server config, Initial Consulting, programming, development, Customer Service, Deeper research, web sites, integration

Where an L2 esculation is handled at L4 it will be determined if the ticket remains in the free state or is changed to chargable or potentially chargeable.
While a ticket remains in the free state it can be actioned until such times as it becomes chargable or potentially chargeable.
When a ticket becomes potentially chargeable The Hosting Shop may contact you for further advice or information or clarification or send you a quote.
When a ticket becomes chargeable The Hosting Shop will contact you with further information or a quote
In any chargeable state The Hosting Shop reserve the right to suspend and place on hold work related to that ticket and to adjust the ticket level. Where the ticket level is lowered pending agreement L4 billable services will be applied at L4 standard rate

Rates in level four are up to £100 an hour dependant on the service(s) you require or need.
L4 standard rate where applied will be £75 (seventy-five) per hour.

Aspects of Level Five : Unresolved Tickets over 48 hours, Network, Security, Hardware, Infrastructure, (planning), core upgrades, Projects, Analysis, backup recovery

Rates in Level Five can be as low as £100 an hour but realistically expect it to cost thousands, in some cases that's per day when you need technical support, management, consulting and strategy at this level..
Unless you have recieved a written quote stating otherwise, the basic rate for Level Five will be £350 (three hundred and fify pounds) per hour.

Level Five incidents take priority over lower level tickets.
Note: In the event of a Level Five incident The Hosting Shop may suspend the ability of customers to raise new tickets so that our team can concentrate on fixing the issue (where we deem it appropriate to suspend the raising of new tickets we will update our announcments page).
Level Four issues take priority of L3 Actions or L4 Requests
L3 tickets take priority over L3 requests.
L2 tickets will be dealt with in the order recieved.
New tickets will be dealt with in the order recieved.

Please contact us using the ticketing system or via our contact us page to schedule a meeting to discuss your specific requirements.

General

When a ticket gets to level five, in one way or another we've all got problems we want to get solved and the best people we have available will be working to fix or make things happen so we can all keep smiling. Somethings are out of our control and we will do our best to keep you informed of progress and any timescales we are notified about.

There is a minimum one hour charge for all tickets. At the desicretion of The Hosting Shop L4 and L5 tickets may be billed in 20 minute increments from the second hour.