Managed Server Root Access Policy

Typically, with fully managed services you are not given root access to your service as it's our job to take care of everything admin related.

There is little need to access your server yourself but should you ever need to do so, we have special requirements that must all be met:

1. Open ticket requesting root access
2. During the time that you have root access, monitoring of your services will disabled
3. Any changes to the system must be documented
4. An explanation of why a change occurred should be documented
5. Submit your information to the support ticket that was initially opened

Once your information has been submitted and your services have been checked to ensure they're running properly, we will revoke root access and then resume monitoring.

This additional overhead requires time and manpower and as such we make a charge of £45 per event.

If any changes result in unintended consequences (e.g. time is spent working out why something isn't working as it should be, we need to deviate from our regular procedures, use alternative software, or documentation isn't clear on what changed/how it changed/why it changed), we reserve the right to charge for additional time required to solve the issue.

Any support tickets raised during this period or as a result of your access to the server will be chargeable at our standard hourly rate.

To minimise the risk of additional charges, we suggest that you follow these guidelines:

1. Don't ask for root access unless absolutely necessary
2. Document any change no matter how small or seemingly inconsequential. Include timestamps where you can and indicate who made the change (this isn't so that blame can later be attributed but because if documentation isn't sufficient, they can be asked to explain the thinking behind the change). Ultimately this is unnecessary with good initial documentation.
3. Keep a log of all command line input and output.