Unofficial MWS blog

Officially we provide support during UK business hours – 09:00-18:00. Our development team is in Russia, so UK business hours for us are 12:00-21.00 local time.

But what happens if you have an urgent problem affecting your server outside those hours?

As the support manager for MWS, I will deal with your call. Here is what happens in such a situation.

Our managers (in whatever capacity they work with you) are always mindful of what can happen if your business-critical application stops on occasions.

Let’s imagine it’s 1am UK time and you have just learned that your server is down: you know it’s 4am Russian time, but this is a problem affecting your business.

If the problem is critical, you need to call our support number (the Russian number is linked to our office, but if you’re a client you have my number too, so it’s better to call me). Support manager will take your call no matter how late it is and investigate your problem immediately.

If it’s a server failure, I will see what I can do and call one of our system administrators, who will respond and do all they can.

If it is just a server failure, which can be fixed in a short time, it will be fixed within 10-20 minutes from taking your call. If we understand there may be some other problems, for example, concerning database or software, I will then call your Project Manager. He or she will investigate the problem too and decide which developer can best help you in this situation, and estimate how long the problem may take to fix. Then I call the developer.

At this point, around 20-30 minutes will have passed since your call. If the problem is a non-critical hardware one, it will have been rectified and your server should be back online.
If the problem is more than just hardware, then there will be people working on it: your Project Manager and one of our developers. You will be informed how long this will take to fix and that we are working to resolve the case.

Normally, if the problem is not the server and there are some critical database or software problems, the site will be up in 30-60 minutes since you first called. If fixing the problem takes longer, we do everything to get the site back online ASAP and continue to investigate and fix the problem. Rarely, this might mean that we have to work on it the following day when we have access to a full complement of technical consultants.

However, usually all servers are up in maximum of 1 hour, and you can go back to sleep.

We do our best to make your business running.