A Service Level Agreement allows us to provide performance monitoring and maintenance of your website or apps, helping to protect you as a client. However, we sometimes get asked, “Do I really need an SLA?” – our answer is always yes, here’s why…
What is a Service Level Agreement with Ballyhoo?
Service Level Agreements are in place to allow us to support your websites and online applications, ensuring that issues are resolved promptly, and any downtime is kept to a minimum. It also ensures that system updates are scheduled and carried out on your behalf, ensuring that your website is kept secure and up-to-date. We also implement tracking and monitoring, to ensure that any issues are dealt with swiftly.
Benefits of an SLA
Peace of Mind
An SLA acts as an ‘insurance policy’, giving you protection against the worst-case scenario and giving you peace of mind. It is a safety net for your business, similar to car insurance – while you may not need it today, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have it. It’s there for you if you do need it.
Proactive Maintenance and Monitoring
An SLA covers all of the work that we do behind the scenes, such as monitoring your systems and carrying out health checks on the security and performance of your website, preventing vulnerabilities and undertaking performance reviews. We also carry out point-in-time website backups that we can roll back up to two weeks if needed, should your website experience errors, security breaches, or even user error.
Mitigating External Risks
Technology systems are complex and issues can occur without warning – for example, a third-party API change could cause an outage – so having an SLA acts as a safety net for you in unforeseen events.
Guaranteed Responses
If you do need to report an issue or access support, our SLA customers benefit from guaranteed response and resolution times. This is especially important for sites and apps that process payments, as a system outage could have a significant financial impact on your business.
The cost of an SLA is not for the volume of support, but instead the promise of a rapid response when a critical issue does occur.
Expert Team
Our team is on standby to help you with knowledge of your specific system, meaning we can get a fix in place quickly and efficiently, to minimise downtime or any knock-on issues.
Reduced Rate
Clients with an SLA benefit from a reduced hourly rate for support services. In contrast, clients without an SLA will be subject to our standard, higher hourly rate, when addressing an unexpected site issue.
What Happens if You Don’t Have an SLA?
If you don’t have an SLA in place with Ballyhoo, and a critical error occurs on your website – for example, a payment processing issue develops – then we are unable to guarantee a response time, and this may also mean that you are subject to our standard hourly rates. The financial loss of your website or business-critical online system being down could far outweigh the annual cost of the SLA. Although we will always do our best for our customers in an emergency, SLAs are in place to ensure that you are a priority.
Dependability
Many of our SLA clients haven’t needed to access emergency support, but this is because our actions outlined above help prevent issues from happening in the first place, proving that we keep your systems stable and well-maintained. This also saves you and your team time out of your day having to call us for help, and ensures that your organisation does not lose custom as your site is continually maintained and kept online.
Outlook
When you have an SLA, you are paying for guaranteed access to our expertise and a rapid response, covering the overhead of having a dedicated team on standby for your organisation that knows your system inside and out.
If you’re interested in an SLA, or need WordPress support, call us on 0121 295 5352 or email us at [email protected] to chat to our team.
