After-hours and weekend IT support
Two different things share this page. One is the work that should never happen during business hours — migrations, cutovers, anything that takes systems down. The other is the night the server stops and Monday is not an acceptable answer.
The short answer
After-hours support covers anything outside 7:30am–5:30pm on a weekday, plus weekends and public holidays. It is included around the clock on the Complete plan and available to everyone else at an agreed rate. Planned disruptive work is quoted as a fixed figure and deliberately scheduled out of hours; genuine emergencies are handled as they arise.
Planned work, done when nobody is watching
The single most avoidable cost in small-business IT is a room full of people who cannot work because someone is upgrading something. Every job on this list gets scheduled outside hours as a matter of course, not as an upsell.
- Microsoft 365 and mail migrations
- Server replacements and operating system upgrades
- Network cutovers and internet service changes
- Office moves and new premises going live
- Major line-of-business software upgrades
- Firewall replacements and security changes that break things briefly
Planned work is quoted as a fixed figure. If it runs three hours longer than expected, that is our problem — which is the only arrangement that keeps the estimate honest.
Emergencies, out of hours
The other half of this page. A short list, because the definition matters — it is what separates a genuine call-out from something that will still be true at 8am.
- A server is down and the business cannot operate
- The whole office has lost internet or email
- Files have been encrypted, or a ransom note has appeared
- Someone has entered a password into something they should not have
- A payment has gone out against an emailed invoice
A job like this
A Southport practice called at 7pm on a Friday: nobody could reach the practice management server, and Saturday clinics started at 8am. Connected in twenty minutes. A storage volume had filled because a log file nobody had ever looked at had been growing since installation. Cleared, resized, alerting added so it can never happen silently again. Saturday ran normally.
What it costs
Complete plan
Included, 24/7, no separate rate. If you have staff working unusual hours or a system that genuinely cannot stop, this is the plan that fits.
Business plan
Business-hours support included, with after-hours available at an agreed rate for genuine emergencies. A server down on a Sunday is not something we leave until Monday.
No plan
Available, arranged in advance where possible, at an out-of-hours rate agreed before anything starts. Planned projects are quoted as a fixed figure.
Questions about after-hours support
What hours does after-hours support cover?
Anything outside 7:30am to 5:30pm on a weekday, including weekends and public holidays. Complete plan clients have it around the clock at no extra charge. Everyone else has it available at an agreed rate, arranged in advance where the work is planned and on the phone where it is not.
Is after-hours support more expensive?
Yes, and it should be. Evening and weekend work is charged at a higher rate than business hours, agreed before anything starts. Planned work — a migration, a cutover, a server replacement — is quoted as a fixed figure rather than billed by the hour, so a job that runs long is our problem rather than yours.
Can you do a migration over a weekend?
That is when most of them happen. Mail migrations, server replacements, network cutovers and office moves are all scheduled Friday evening through Sunday so that Monday morning is ordinary. We test before people arrive rather than finding out at 8:45.
What counts as a genuine after-hours emergency?
The business is stopped and cannot wait for morning: a server down, a whole-office outage, a suspected ransomware event, or a security incident in progress. A single slow laptop at 9pm is real to the person using it, but it is a Monday job and we will say so.
Do you answer the phone at 2am?
For Complete plan clients, yes. For everyone else, calls outside hours go to a message and are picked up at the start of the next business day unless a prior after-hours arrangement is in place. We would rather be honest about that than promise a phone nobody answers.
Related: remote IT support · emergency IT support · plans and pricing
Planning something disruptive? Book it for a Friday night and have an ordinary Monday.
Arrange it