Thank you... our business is growing dramatically and we now feel on top of our servers and system thanks to your speedy expertise.
Ad-Hoc Consulting
While we prefer building ongoing relationships, we appreciate that you sometimes need help "now-ish" and we're happy to show our expertise before you commit to a longer or ongoing arrangement. We offer consulting using email through our issue tracking system, instant messenging, SSH login, and sometimes over the phone, or on-site. Full pricing and other details below. Our background and subject matter expertise is proven. Have you got our book?
To discuss your specific needs, just contact us now!
Terms
- Our pricing for ad-hoc consulting is simple, the rate is 150 per hour. We charge in one of the following currencies: AUD (excl.GST), USD, CAD, EUR at this base rate, so both you and Open Query are not subject by exchange rates. Generally we don't even convert internally, we just pay our engineers directly in their local currency.
- We charge actual hours spent on you, rather than using complicated math with corresponding higher rates. So, if you would like us to write up an extensive report on a particular project, that's simply charged at the (remote) hourly rate. So you know exactly where you're at, no funny business.
- Scheduled on-site support is charged at 1.5x base rate plus travel expenses (car km or flight costs).
- Unscheduled rates are x2 for business hours, x3 all other hours. Availability not guaranteed (we greatly value our life outside work, and we prefer to focus on preventing fires rather than fighting them). Note: we only handle one emergency case per client, ever. You may come in as an urgent case, but we really don't want you to stay that way.
- There is no limitation of scope within the agreed realm (i.e., MySQL), so we don't charge extra for assistance with more servers, replication, or performance - aren't all questions essentially about performance, anyway?
- We will invoice you after the initial job, or after a sensible first period for a longer arrangement. You will pay promptly, or we may choose to not do further business with you. Yes, we do that.
- We recommend the (free) OurDelta builds of MySQL as they provide additional management and measurement instrumentation as well as performance benefits, however we will try to help you with any MySQL version and build; we have in-house expertise all the way back to MySQL version 3.23.
- Requests are initiated through our tracking system, and assigned to an available Open Query engineer. All correspondence including emails, phone call summaries, configuration, status and logfiles, get attached to your request, and of course the time spent is recorded in this way as well. As Open Query has a distributed infrastructure, phone or Skype calls are generally initiated by the assigned Open Query engineer.
- We aim for a response time within the next business day, with all assistance given on a best-effort basis. Our focus is to help improve your setup so that emergencies are prevented. We prefer and prioritise our subscription clients rather than ad-hoc consultancy.
