FAQ

At Shipshape IT, we’re keenly focused on providing outstanding client service. It is, therefore, our company policy to respond to client requests as soon as possible. For requests submitted via our service portal, or via our contact us page, we will contact you within 15 minutes of receiving the request. This policy is effective between the hours of 8:00AM and 9:00PM, Monday through Friday, excluding major holidays.  Shipshape IT is also available for emergency support on Saturdays and Sundays between the hours of 9:00AM and 5:00PM.

We believe in the fundamental goodness of humanity; however, let’s face it: people respond to incentives. It’s a basic law of economics.

At Shipshape IT, things are uncluttered and uncomplicated. You will not find hourly billing, fine print, up charges for overtime, or complex charts detailing service options you don’t need. What you will find are unlimited services, reasonable flat rates, no early termination fees for ending a relationship, and highly competent staff using the a standardized toolset and consistent methods to help your organization’s IT infrastructure run smoothly—so you can concentrate on running your business. You will find comprehensive and responsive support for your IT operations, whether working remotely, onsite or in the cloud.

Has your sever ever crashed? If so, your IT support company probably responded and fixed the problem—and then sent you a big bill as you cheered them on for saving the day. But who’s job is it to prevent such a problem in the first place? If your IT support company receives a payday when the server crashes, what is the incentive to proactively work to prevent that failure? Under Shipshape IT’s service model, if you experience a major IT failure you don’t pay for the fix. We do. It’s in our interests—and yours—to prevent that failure from happening. Our interests are aligned, and the result is superior service.

Now let’s talk about staffing. A company that charges an hourly rate for services has an economic incentive to hire staff that costs less yet requires more time to complete a job. After all, more billable time means more revenue, and less expensive staff means less overhead. Have you ever wondered, “why did that take so long?” when reviewing an IT services bill? Under Shipshape IT’s flat rate model, our incentive is to maintain staff and systems with maximum effectiveness. This means we hire expensive, amazingly talented people—and you never have to look at a bill and scratch your head.

Portal is the communications backbone of the administrative and logistical elements of our managed services delivery. Portal is shared with our clients and ensures proper oversight of Shipshape IT’s performance, keeping you informed about your IT operations with traceability, version control and collaborative updates. Portal will make your job easier.

Have you ever seen a black swan? Probably not, but just because you’ve never seen something doesn’t mean you should conclude it doesn’t exist. Extending this metaphor to IT, we consider a black swan to be an unanticipated event with potentially harmful consequences. Think of a successful Ransomware or Phishing attack, disk or other media failures, hardware theft, Internet outages, an inaccessible building, and other difficult situations. Our service protects you from black swans, through the use of state of the art security technology, continuous monitoring, off site data backup and replication, our proprietary operations Portal, email security and continuity, cyber security training for clients, and more. We strongly believe every company should have these things and we provide them to our Comprehensive IT Support – Critical MaaS clients.

Shipshape IT maintains and furnishes all clients with our Advanced Web-Based Project/Account Management Tool and Executive Dashboard called Portal. Portal is Shipshape IT’s foundation for operations management essentials and the often neglected administrative and logistical elements of MSP service delivery. Portal’s inherent documentation, policy/procedure-detail, traceability, versioning and change-control-tracking are all essential components to ensure Shipshape IT have proper oversight and documentation to verify Shipshape IT’s performance is up to White Glove standards.

We configure monitoring and alerts based on policies established at your service kick-off meeting. One unique aspect of our monitoring system is that our clients have the ability to check monitoring status themselves via our Operations Portal.

Our clients typically have one or two on site employees who handle routine maintenance tasks and also act as our eyes and hands when it makes sense to do so. That said, we will happily visit a client to change a toner cartridge.

We assist our clients with the development and deployment of data protection systems, policies, procedures. For clients with premise infrastructure, we typically maintain off site copies—virtualized images—of their servers and important workstations. These virtualized images are essentially copies of each system’s the operating system, applications and data. Further, they are remotely stored and ready to operate within our data center infrastructure in the event of a client’s emergency. For clients who operate primarily on a Public Cloud, such as AWS, Azure, or GCP, we can maintain copies of their systems and data at the Shipshape IT data center. Imaging is an important aspect of the disaster recovery and business continuity components of our Comprehensive IT Support – Critical MaaS. In addition to imaging, Shipshape IT provides clients with file based backups. All backup data, whether file or image based, is securely encrypted both in transit and at rest.

Unlimited web hosting is included with our Comprehensive IT Support – Critical MaaS. Most of our clients save money by canceling their incumbent web hosting service after they sign up with us. In addition, web hosting is available as a standalone service.

Email security and continuity are included with our Comprehensive IT Support – Critical MaaS. In addition, Mail Security and Continuity is separately available as a stand-alone service.

Unlimited off site backups are included with our Comprehensive IT Support – Critical MaaS. The peace of mind provided by this is priceless. In addition, backup is separately available as a stand alone service.

We don’t separately charge our Comprehensive IT Support clients for hosting. You may be starting to see a trend here. Server hosting, both physical and virtual, is also available as a stand-alone service.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, no. We already own massive infrastructure in our data centers that can support your systems. Typically, we find it more efficient to support your server in our professional, high-availability hosting environment than elsewhere.

The way we see it, if you’re our client, you hired us to perform a critical mission. Our infrastructure and expertise should be available to you without limitation in order to accomplish this mission.

Yes, we perform projects for clients on a flat rate basis per deliverable. Please contact us for additional information.