Continuity
Continuity means making what was built last: updates, tested backups, monitoring. If something breaks, someone knows before you do, and deals with it.
When people call us
- You don't know when your domains expire.
- Nobody checks that the backups actually restore.
- "We find out about outages from our customers."
- Your site works, but nobody has done the updates in a long time.
- You have a list of small things to fix on your site, and nobody to deal with them.
- Your dependencies are reaching the end of their support and nobody is tracking it.
What we do
Updates. Technical and security updates, applied on a regular schedule, not when someone remembers. Keeping watch is part of the work: when a dependency, a piece of software your site rests on, approaches the end of its support, you know before it becomes a risk.
Monitoring. Availability, speed, certificates, domain expiry, backups. When something breaks, the alert comes to us, not to your customers.
Verified backups. A backup never tested isn’t a backup. We restore regularly, for real, and the result is recorded: the day it has to be done in a hurry, it will already be a familiar routine.
Fixes and small changes. Your requests have somewhere to go. We fix, we judge what’s worth doing, and when a request deserves real work, we say so rather than slipping it into the maintenance.
Periodic review. What has been done, what’s coming, what should be decided. Upkeep is not enough: it’s also the moment when decisions are prepared calmly, rather than during an outage.
Maintenance comes as a monthly subscription, whose scope is defined with you. What stays constant from one contract to the next are the commitments: response time, monitoring frequency, how often the client review happens. And it covers what we built or what we’re responsible for: the site, the foundations, the automations, the hosting.
Examples of deliverables
- The periodic review report: what has been done, what's coming, what should be decided.
- A log of updates and interventions.
- The results of the restore tests.
- A monitoring dashboard, available at any time.
- A calendar of expiry dates: domains, certificates, end of support, nothing expires by surprise.
- An incident report: what happened, what was done, what will stop it happening again.
- The commitments written into the contract: response time, monitoring frequency, how often the review happens.
Questions
Does your maintenance cover our workstations and printers?
No, it’s not our trade and we would rather say so beforehand.
We take charge of what we build and what we’re responsible for: your sites, your foundations, your automations. For the IT estate and day-to-day user support you need a local provider; we can help you choose one and work cleanly with them.
And if you're no longer there, who carries on?
That’s precisely why everything is in your name: domains, hosting, accounts, code, data. Everything is documented and handed over.
We work with standard technology, not proprietary solutions. Anyone can take over after us. Few in our market can say as much.
How many of you're behind the maintenance?
A small team, with partners wherever a job calls for a skill we don’t have. We will always tell you who is working on what. And we remain responsible for the result, whoever is at the keyboard.
You develop your own products: does our maintenance come second?
No, and it’s rather the opposite: our products are what force us to hold the standard we sell you.
Running a service in production, documenting it, securing it, maintaining it over time: it’s the same standard we hold to on your work, except that here nobody asks it of us. You can go and look, by the way: the code of notabene is public.
How do you price maintenance?
It depends on what you want to achieve, and that’s exactly the first thing we talk about. We talk, we scope, and you leave with an estimate that binds us, not an order of magnitude that will move three times.
What we can say straight away: we’re not the cheapest option, and that’s not what we’re trying to be.
Tell us about your project, or your problem.
Describe your situation in a few lines, however it comes to you. You get a first reading in writing: what we understand, what we would do, where to start. Not an automatic acknowledgement, and no sales follow-up: an answer you can use, even if it stops there.