Monitoring, alerts and on-call support - for shops where downtime costs money
For a simple business website, an hour offline is a minor issue. For a shop with a few hundred orders a month, the same hour means a specific sum of money and a string of calls from customers. For businesses like that, a standard maintenance plan isn't enough.
Who it's for
Monitoring and on-call support is an extension of the monthly plan, designed for shops and websites where any interruption means lost orders. Most clients don't need it, and in that case we don't offer it.
It makes sense when at least one of the following applies:
- the shop takes orders every day, including evenings and weekends
- you run ad campaigns that send traffic to the site at specific times
- you sell across several time zones
- integrations with your warehouse, payments or courier can fall out of sync without warning
- your sales season brings a several-fold rise in traffic within a short time
What we monitor
- Website and shop availability, checked automatically at short intervals
- The checkout path: whether you can add a product to the basket and get through to payment
- Payments and integrations: whether the payment provider, warehouse and courier are responding
- SSL certificate and domain: expiry dates, before they turn into an outage
- Loading time and sudden drops in performance
- Search engine errors: pages dropping out of the index, indexing errors
The alert comes to us, not to you. The point of this service is that you hear about an outage together with the news that it's already being fixed, not from a customer who couldn't pay.
On-call cover and response time
Technical on-call support means a set response time outside normal working hours, written into the contract. In France this kind of standby is called astreinte, and it's a separate, paid item, with us too.
We set the scope of on-call cover around your sales: the hours, days of the week, maximum response time and how to contact us. A shop selling in Europe and a shop that also sells to America have different critical hours, and there's no point paying for standby at times when nobody buys.
What we do when something goes down
- We get things working again, starting with the ability to place orders
- We tell you what happened and what was done, without technical jargon
- We look for the cause, so the same thing doesn't come back a month later
- We prepare a message for your customers if the outage was visible to them
The last point is needed more often than you'd think. A payment failure on a Saturday evening ends up in Google reviews if nobody replies to customers on Monday.
How payment works
You pay for the build once, at the start. The monthly plan for ongoing care is optional, and its cost depends on what your business needs. These are two separate items and can't be confused on the invoice.
The one-off fee covers everything created at the start: the audit, strategy, a logo if you don't have one, the website or shop, SEO, AEO and GEO, and tidied-up social media profiles. The amount depends on the scope and is set after the audit, not taken from a ready-made price list. The highest quotes are for Shopify stores with a large number of products.
The monthly plan starts with hosting and maintenance alone. You add only what you really need: social media management, monthly content and, for a large shop, monitoring and technical on-call support. You know the cost of the plan when you get the project quote, so from the outset you know what it will cost over three years, not just at the start.
You don't rent your website from us: once the project is paid for, the domain, code and content belong to your business. The monthly plan is optional and fitted to your needs, and cancelling it doesn't take your site down.
When you don't need it
For a simple business website without a shop, a service business taking enquiries by email or a shop with a few orders a week, standard hosting and maintenance is entirely enough. It already includes uptime monitoring.
We only add on-call support once we've worked out together what an hour of downtime costs you. If that amount is lower than the cost of being on standby, there's no reason to pay for it.
Common questions about monitoring and on-call support
How is this different from the standard monthly plan?
The standard plan includes uptime monitoring and a response during working hours. The extension adds monitoring of the checkout path and integrations, on-call cover outside working hours and a maximum response time set in the contract.
How much does technical on-call support cost?
It depends on the hours covered and how short the response time needs to be. Being on standby at weekends and in the evenings costs more than on working days.
For a large, successful shop, a plan with on-call support can be expensive, which is why we work it out with you against the cost of an hour of downtime rather than quoting a rate from a price list.
Do you guarantee that the shop will never go down?
No, and nobody can honestly guarantee that: an outage can be on the side of the payment provider, the hosting provider or an external integration.
What we guarantee is the response time: that we'll find out about the problem quickly and start working on it within the time set in the contract. That's what can be promised and checked.
Can I take on-call support for the season only?
Yes. For seasonal sales, we add on-call support for the months you choose and remove it outside the season. It's a common and sensible arrangement.
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