The awkward
ones first.

The fair objection, and the reason everything is arranged the way it is. Every domain, licence and account is in your name. You hold every password. Each job ends with a written page covering what is plugged into what.

So if I vanish tomorrow, any competent person can pick your setup up and carry on — which is more than can be said for a setup only a departing provider ever understood. For planned time away I tell you in advance. For anything genuinely urgent while I am unreachable, that documentation is exactly what lets somebody else help you today instead of next week.

Because a number on a public page belongs to whoever dials it, and most of them are selling search engine optimisation. The form goes straight to my inbox and nowhere else, and I answer within one business day. Once we are working together you get my direct number. The form is the front door, not the whole house.

No. No minimum term, no retainer, no cancellation fee, no notice period. You approve a written price for a piece of work, I do that work, and then we are square. If you never ring again nothing lapses and nothing is owed.

Almost certainly not. The work suits one to fifty people with nobody on staff whose actual job is the computers, and the low end of that is a real business worth doing properly. A sole trader with one laptop and a domain name is still a setup that can be quietly wrong for years.

You do, always, from the first day. Domains and licences registered in your business name, cloud accounts yours, and you hold the keys to all of it. If we part ways you lose nothing but my phone number. I will not hold a domain hostage, and nobody reputable should.

Far more is remote than people expect, and remote costs the same as on site. The half hour it takes me to drive to you is half an hour you would be paying for, so if a job can be done down a wire it gets done down a wire. For anything beyond a single fix I do want to see the place once — half of these problems are not the thing everyone thinks they are.

Then keep them. If they are doing the job, replacing them costs you money and buys you nothing. Where I am occasionally useful alongside an existing arrangement is a second opinion before you sign something, or a specific piece of work theirs does not cover. I take no commissions, so there is nothing in it for me in telling you your current person is wrong.

No, and deliberately so. You buy the equipment directly, in your name, at the price anyone else pays, and I tell you what to order. The moment I make money on the box, my advice about which box you need is worth less.

A working thing, and one page in plain English: what is plugged into what, which accounts exist, who pays for them and when they renew. Then I show you how to check the backup yourself, hand over every password, and get out of your way. The page is yours and it works whether or not I am still the one holding the phone.

The sign is a joke. The scale is not — it is genuinely how I triage, and the tone gets flatter the further up it you go for exactly that reason. By the time you reach Critical there are no gags left on the page, only instructions.

If something is happening right now, skip all of it and say so in the first line of the message. I will treat it that way.