Priority Incident Response Retainer

A reserved escalation path into our engineering team, held through the months when nothing happens so that it exists in the month when something does. You get a route past the normal queue, a four business hour response target for a P1, and a written account afterwards of what broke and what we changed. It is a commitment to answer, not a claim that somebody is watching your systems every second.

What you get

• A P1 escalation route by phone and email, with a four business hour response target
• Engineering time reserved for you each month and drawn on when you raise an incident
• A written post-incident report: timeline, cause as far as it can be established, what we changed, what we recommend next
• An agreed contact list and a short runbook for your systems, written while things are calm rather than at the time
• A quarterly review of the incidents raised — or of the fact that none were

What this does not cover

• Round-the-clock cover — the response target is counted in business hours, and the only plan where a person answers outside them is Business Critical Managed Hosting, not this retainer
• Detection. We respond when you or your monitoring tells us, and the telling is Uptime and Alert Monitoring
• Forensic investigation for a court, an insurer or a regulator, and liaison with law enforcement
• Your notification duties: if an incident affects your customers or their data, the decision and the disclosure remain yours
• Payment environments — card details are captured by your payment provider and never reach systems we run, so a suspected card compromise is raised with that provider and the card issuer, not with us
• The rebuild. Hours spent restoring or re-engineering what an incident damaged are quoted separately from the retainer

Who it fits

A business that would lose real money in a day of downtime and has nobody in-house to call at nine in the morning. If your systems are not monitored at all, buy Uptime and Alert Monitoring first — a fast response to an incident nobody has noticed yet is worth nothing.