Planned Maintenance Windows & Scheduled Downtime
For clients on managed services, hosting, or ongoing support retainers, there will occasionally be planned maintenance periods. This article explains how we communicate and manage these.
What Is a Planned Maintenance Window?
A maintenance window is a pre-agreed period during which we may take services offline (fully or partially) to perform upgrades, patches, infrastructure changes, or preventive maintenance. Unlike incidents or outages, planned maintenance is scheduled in advance and communicated to you.
Our Standard Maintenance Schedule
- Routine maintenance: Typically scheduled outside of business hours — most commonly between 11pm–5am (GMT/BST) on weekdays or at weekends
- Security patches (critical): May be applied at short notice if a zero-day vulnerability is identified. We will notify you as quickly as possible in these cases.
- Major upgrades: Planned at least 5 business days in advance with written notification via this portal
How You Will Be Notified
- A notification will be sent via this portal (support ticket or email) at least 48–72 hours before any planned maintenance that could affect service availability
- We will state the expected start time, end time, and impact (full outage, reduced performance, specific function unavailable)
- After maintenance is complete, we will send a confirmation that services have been restored and provide a brief summary of what was done
Requesting Changes to Maintenance Windows
If a proposed maintenance window conflicts with a critical business event (e.g. a product launch, high-traffic campaign, or board meeting), please notify us as soon as possible and we will reschedule where operationally feasible.
Blackout periods (dates you want protected from maintenance) can be registered with your Account Manager — particularly useful for seasonal businesses.
Emergency Out-of-Hours Maintenance
In the event of a critical incident requiring emergency maintenance outside of a planned window, we will:
- Notify you immediately via phone (for Priority 1 incidents) and by portal ticket
- Provide a brief on the issue, what we are doing, and estimated time to resolution
- Send a Post-Incident Report (PIR) within 48 hours of resolution for major incidents
Maintenance & SLA Credits
Planned maintenance windows that have been communicated in advance do not count against your uptime SLA. Emergency maintenance required to prevent a larger outage may also be excluded — refer to your specific Service Level Agreement for exact terms.