Support for a small web business
Support for a small web business
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Discussion

purplepolarbear

Original Poster:

486 posts

190 months

Saturday 8th January 2022
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Someone I know has had a small but bespoke web site written (the tech stack is PHP/MySQL and hosted in Azure). They want to ensure if any issues arise they are resolved quickly, even if the developers aren't around. Looking at it, it seems reasonably well implemented and I don't anticipate there will be many issues (quite possibly none at all) and this is mainly for reassurance.

Are there services that offer the following and if so, can anyone offer any recommendations?

1) We would initially spend some time going over how the site works with them and set up monitoring alerts to go to them.
2) They would be big enough to have people working on shifts who would receive these alerts and if any fired they would take a look within a time period specified by an SLA, contact us if they could, and do their best to fix things (most likely attempt a reboot in the first instance). If it is a more complex issue they should work with us to help us resolve it quickly.
3) They should ideally be available for occasional planned work such as to review whether security has been implemented correctly.
4) They must be trustworthy as they would need to be given things like admin passwords.

Ideally they would like to pay for this service on an hourly basis for any time they spend doing things, with a monthly retainer to ensure they are available if we need them.





Akiraprise

271 posts

204 months

Saturday 8th January 2022
quotequote all
It's an interesting one, I'm not sure of many (if any) services which could offer that service for a site they've not built. Any problems that arise could be based on anything and without knowing how the site is structured and developed it could take a while to find any problems.

I would think the best bet would be to speak to the original developers to see if they could offer a service around your requirements.

purplepolarbear

Original Poster:

486 posts

190 months

Sunday 9th January 2022
quotequote all
Thanks - I'll give them a call and see what they say.

w1bbles

1,151 posts

152 months

Friday 21st January 2022
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I worked with these guys about 9 years ago:

https://www.xpertex.com/#about

Might be worth talking to them.

48k

15,358 posts

164 months

Friday 21st January 2022
quotequote all
"They want to ensure if any issues arise they are resolved quickly, even if the developers aren't around"

Who owns the IP in the source code and what are the scenarios whereby the existing company can't support their own code? And are they happy to have a second company make changes to their code and merge those changes back in? And who warranties which bits of code?

Bit of a strange scenario that has the potential to be a bit messy.