If your business has more than five staff, downtime costs more than IT support does. The awkward part is that the cost is invisible until it happens, which is why so many small businesses only start looking for a provider on the morning everything stops.
Three common models
- Break-fix freelancer — you pay per call-out. Cheapest right up until your server goes down on a Friday afternoon and nobody answers.
- In-house IT — excellent at scale, hard to justify below about thirty staff, and you carry the risk when that person is on leave.
- Managed service provider — a fixed monthly fee, with monitoring that is meant to catch problems before you notice them.
What a managed service should include
- Remote monitoring and alerts on every workstation and server
- Patch management for Windows and third-party applications
- Endpoint antivirus and detection
- Cloud or on-premise backup, with restores actually tested
- Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace administration
- A regular review that is about your business, not a list of tickets closed
How it is priced
- 5–10 users: priced per user per month, quoted once we know what you run
- 10–25 users: a lower per-user rate at this size, quoted the same way
- 25+ users: tailored to the environment
We quote after looking at what you actually have, because two businesses with the same headcount can have completely different requirements. One with a server, a POS system and cameras is not the same job as ten laptops and a Wi-Fi router.
Questions worth asking any provider
- When did you last test a restore? Not “do you back up” — every provider says yes. Ask when they last actually restored something and proved it worked. Backups that have never been restored are a hope, not a plan.
- What happens when I call at 4pm on a Friday? The answer tells you more than any brochure.
- Who owns the licences and the domain? They should be in your name. Providers who register things in their own name are hard to leave, and that is sometimes the intention.
- What is the response time, and what happens if you miss it? A time with no consequence attached is an aspiration.
- Can I have a list of what you manage? A provider who cannot quickly say what machines they look after is not monitoring them.
Things that go wrong on the South Coast specifically
- Load-shedding. If the router and switch are not on backup power, the network drops even when the computers stay up on their UPS units. Card machines and cloud systems stop with it. This is a decision to make deliberately, not discover.
- Power quality. Repeated outages and the surges that come with restoration are hard on power supplies and drives. Failures cluster after a bad week on the grid.
- Salt air. Anything within sight of the sea corrodes faster than the datasheet suggests, particularly network gear in outbuildings and cameras on exterior walls.
- Distance. Some things genuinely cannot be fixed remotely. When a switch dies, you want somebody who can be there.
Backups are where most businesses are exposed
In our experience the single most common gap is not antivirus or firewalls — it is a backup that nobody has verified. The failure is always the same shape: the backup was set up years ago, it stopped working at some point, nobody was watching the alerts, and the discovery is made on the worst possible day.
A backup you have not restored from is not a backup. Test it, or have someone test it, and ask to see the result.
Switching provider
It is less disruptive than most people fear, provided the handover covers the essentials: administrator credentials, domain and licence ownership, documentation of what exists, and backup access. If your current provider is reluctant to hand those over, that is itself a reason to move.
Why local matters
Remote support handles the large majority of issues, and it should — it is faster than waiting for anyone to drive anywhere. But when a switch dies you want a technician on site within the hour, not the next day. We are based in Ramsgate and cover the South Coast from Umtentweni through to Port Edward, including Margate, Port Shepstone, Shelly Beach and Hibberdene.
Contact us for a free IT health check — we will tell you what we find, including the parts you are getting right.
