After-hours and weekend work: what to expect

Our help desk runs Monday to Friday, 8 am to 6 pm Pacific time, excluding statutory holidays. Work outside those hours falls into two very different categories, and it helps to know which is which before you need it.

Emergencies

For clients on a managed plan, emergencies are handled around the clock. An emergency is something that stops the business from operating with no workaround: nobody can sign in, ransomware, a site-wide outage, or money or a password handed over after a suspicious message. For these, call 855-248-2637 rather than emailing, and say the word emergency. Our article How to get help, and what counts as an emergency has the full list.

Planned after-hours work

Some work is better done when nobody is using the systems: a server migration, a network change, moving everyone to a new email system, or a software upgrade that needs everything closed. We schedule that kind of work for evenings or weekends, agree the time with you in advance, and document a rollback plan before we start. How after-hours work is charged is set out in your service agreement, and we confirm it in the quote or change plan before the work is booked.

Non-urgent requests sent after hours

An email sent at 9 pm about a printer, a forgotten password or a question is picked up first thing the next working day. You do not need to do anything special; it is logged when it arrives and queued in order.

Updates and monitoring do not stop

The monitoring agents on your computers keep reporting overnight and at weekends, and scheduled updates run on their own timetable. If monitoring picks up something that counts as an emergency, such as a backup failure on every computer at once or a security alert, it is treated as one. Routine alerts wait for the next working day.

Holidays

Statutory holidays follow the province or state your business is in. Emergency cover for managed clients continues on holidays.