IT Support Questions & Answers

It is quoted per client, after looking at what you actually have. There is no price list on this page because a number published without seeing your environment is a guess, and you would be right to distrust it. What moves the figure: how many people and machines there are, whether you run servers, how old the equipment is, how much has to be repaired before it can sensibly be maintained, and whether you want on-site visits on a regular schedule or only when something happens. The assessment behind the quote costs nothing, and what comes out of it is a flat monthly fee you can budget for instead of an invoice that spikes in the month something breaks. How managed IT services work sets out what an agreement covers.

Continuous monitoring of your servers and network equipment, so a filling disk or a failing drive is seen before it stops anyone working. Scheduled preventative maintenance, including the unglamorous half of it — physically cleaning the dust out of machines so they stop overheating and slowing themselves down. Helpdesk support for your staff, and on-site visits for the work a screen share cannot do. Every agreement is customized, so the exact scope is written into your contract rather than left to be argued about later.

No. One-off repair and support work is quoted and billed as the job it is, with nothing ongoing attached to it. The monthly agreement is a separate decision you make when you want monitoring, maintenance and helpdesk running continuously instead of calling each time something breaks. Plenty of relationships start with one broken machine and never become anything more, and that is a perfectly good outcome.

Around-the-clock telephone support is a managed-services entitlement — it is one of the things the monthly fee buys, and it is written into the agreement. Without an agreement, the phone is answered Monday – Friday, 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM Pacific, and anything that arrives outside those hours is read when the phone is answered again. If out-of-hours cover matters to you, because you run a second shift or something has to be up before the first person arrives, say so in the first conversation: it changes what the agreement should look like.

That is common and it is not awkward. Sometimes the sensible arrangement is alongside them — taking the monitoring, the backups, or one project that is bigger than any single person can carry — while they keep doing the parts they do well. Sometimes it is a handover, and there the thing that matters is completeness rather than speed: passwords documented, licenses and domain names registered in the company's name rather than an individual's, backup access transferred, and somebody able to explain how the network is actually wired. Ask for those four things from whoever you hire next, including us.

Disconnect it from the internet — pull the network cable or switch wi-fi off — and stop using it, particularly for banking or anything that needs a password typed in. Do not pay whatever a pop-up is demanding, and do not ring a phone number that has appeared on the screen: that number is part of the scam, not the way out of it. Then call from a different device. If files are already encrypted and a ransom is being asked for, leave the machine alone entirely, because virus and malware removal has far better odds before anyone has tried a few things of their own.

Often, but nobody can honestly promise it, and anyone who does is selling. It depends on how the drive failed: a corrupted file system, a deleted partition or a disk somebody formatted by mistake is a very different job from a drive with a mechanical fault. The chances also fall every time a failing drive is powered up again to try one more thing. The right first move is to stop using it, leave it switched off, and call — data recovery begins with working out what is actually wrong before anything is attempted.

By restoring from it, which is the step almost nobody takes. A backup that has been quietly failing for months looks identical to one that works: a green tick, a folder with today's date, a service reporting that the last run succeeded — right up to the morning you need it. A backup worth having gets tested by pulling a real file back out of it, exists in at least two places with one of them off-site and encrypted, and belongs to a written plan that says who restores what and in what order. If nobody has done that test this year, treat the backup as unproven. This is the heart of backup and disaster recovery planning.

Almost certainly, and this is one of the most expensive assumptions in small business IT. Services like Microsoft 365 keep your data available and protect you from their own hardware failing; they are not an archive of your choosing, and their retention windows are limited. A file deleted, overwritten, encrypted by ransomware or removed by somebody on their way out can pass beyond what the provider still holds. Encrypted off-site backup that you control is what lets you go back to a date you pick rather than a date somebody else picked for you.

Forensics is examining a computer, phone or drive to establish what actually happened on it, in a way that holds together when somebody disputes it: an employee suspected of taking client files on the way out, a device at the center of a dispute, an account reached by someone who should never have had it. What separates it from ordinary IT work is discipline — the original is preserved and never worked on, an exact copy is examined in its place, and every step is documented so the findings can be explained afterwards. If you think you might need it, the most valuable thing you can do is stop using the device and call before anyone has a quick look around.