Extended & Peak Season Care

1. How These Schedules Fit

Every website we look after sits on one of our published Hosting & Care Plans. Those plans cover the day-to-day work of keeping a site healthy: security and vulnerability monitoring, updates, daily off-site backups, performance tuning, uptime monitoring, malware cleanup, monthly reporting and priority support.

What they do not include is a guaranteed response outside business hours. Outside those hours we work on a best-effort basis — in practice usually quickly, but without a commitment we would be willing to put in writing. The two schedules in this document are how that commitment is purchased.

1.1 Eligibility

Both schedules require an active Managed Hosting + Care Package ($75 per month and above). They are not available alongside Hosting Only, and not available where a third party controls the hosting environment.

The reason is practical rather than commercial. We cannot guarantee a response time on a server we do not control. A large share of after-hours emergencies are resolved at the infrastructure level, and if we have to raise a ticket with somebody else's host and wait in their queue, the guarantee is worthless.

For eCommerce, membership, booking and other revenue-critical websites we recommend the Managed Hosting + Care Package — Pro tier (dedicated VPS) as the foundation, since the failure modes these schedules exist to cover are considerably more likely on shared infrastructure.

1.2 Who these are for

• Online stores, particularly those selling across time zones or into export markets.
• Businesses with a pronounced trading season — retail through the fourth quarter, tourism and events through the summer, accounting practices through tax season, ticketing around a fixed date.
• Booking, registration, ticketing and membership platforms, where an outage means lost bookings rather than a quiet page.
• Any website where an hour of downtime costs meaningfully more than the cover does.

These schedules are not for everyone, and we will say so. A brochure website that generates enquiries during business hours does not need them, and we would rather tell a client that plainly than sell cover they will never use.

2. Definitions

3. Severity Levels

Every request is classified into one of three levels. Classification is based on the business impact of the issue — not the time of day it is raised, and not how urgently it is described.

3.1 Response commitment by coverage level

The table below is the substance of this document. It shows precisely what each level of coverage changes.

A P3 request does not become a P1 because of when it is submitted. A request to add a page, change a product or adjust a design received at 3:00 AM is answered at the start of the next business day and quoted normally. Should a client wish such work carried out immediately outside Business Hours, it can be — the Off-Hours or Emergency rate in section 6 then applies. The choice, and the cost, rest with the client.

4. The Extended Care Plan

$250 per month, year-round. Added to any Managed Hosting + Care Package.

4.1 What is being purchased

Certainty outside business hours. Under a standard plan, an emergency arising at 9:00 PM on a Saturday is attended to on a best-effort basis. Under this schedule it carries a guaranteed response time, in writing, every day of the year — and a number that reaches somebody.

4.2 Inclusions

• Guaranteed P1 response within two (2) hours at any hour of any day, including weekends and statutory holidays.
• A dedicated after-hours emergency line, monitored outside Business Hours.
• One (1) hour per month of Off-Hours P1 remediation work at no additional charge.
• Quarterly restore testing — a backup is only useful once it has been proven to restore, so this is verified rather than assumed.
• Quarterly review of the plugin and extension stack: version currency, known vulnerabilities, abandoned or unsupported components, and licence renewal dates.
• Advance written notice before any third-party licence or subscription lapses.

The included hour does not accumulate between months and is not refundable. Work beyond it is billed at the applicable rate in section 6.

5. The Peak Season Care Plan

$750 per month, for a nominated Coverage Period. Most clients take three consecutive months; the minimum is one. The period is chosen by the client and confirmed in writing at least thirty (30) days before it begins, so that the readiness review can be completed before the season opens.

5.1 What is being purchased

Availability — the reservation of capacity, and a named person reachable at any hour for the duration of the period. This fee is payable whether or not an incident occurs, in the same way an insurance premium is payable in a year without a claim. What is purchased is not the work performed; it is the certainty that work will begin immediately if it is ever needed.

A business that earns the greater part of its annual revenue in a handful of weeks carries a different kind of risk from one that trades evenly across the year. An outage in an ordinary month is an inconvenience. The same outage during the season can cost more than a year of cover. This schedule exists for that asymmetry.

We are candid about why this is priced as it is: it is genuinely constraining. For the duration of the period, one of our principals is not off-grid. That has a real cost, and we would rather charge it honestly than make a promise we would come to resent keeping at two in the morning. A cheaper version of this would be a worse answer when you needed one.

5.2 Inclusions

• A direct mobile number reaching the studio principal personally, active 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the full Coverage Period.
• Guaranteed P1 response within thirty (30) minutes at any hour of any day, including statutory holidays.
• Two (2) hours per month of Off-Hours P1 remediation work at no additional charge.
• Priority scheduling ahead of all other clients for any P2 issue arising during the period.
• A pre-season readiness review in the final week before the period opens: full backup and restore verification, transaction testing across devices, browsers and every payment method, plugin and licence audit, load testing, and a written report of findings.
• Weekly verification of the transaction path throughout the period, including a live test order or booking, so that a payment failure is discovered by us rather than by a customer.
• Enhanced uptime monitoring at one-minute intervals for the duration of the period.
• Administration of a trading freeze where the client elects one, as described in section 7.
• A post-season report covering incidents, uptime and recommendations for the following year.

5.3 Exclusions specific to this schedule

• Change Requests of any kind. These remain P3.
• Off-Hours remediation beyond the two included hours per month, which is billed at the Emergency rate.
• Faults originating with a third-party platform outside our control, as described in section 10.

6. Rate Card

All work outside the inclusions above is billed at the following rates. Rates are in Canadian dollars, exclusive of GST, and billed in 15-minute increments with a 30-minute minimum per discrete task.

Work expected to take two hours or more is quoted in advance and confirmed in writing before it begins. No client is billed for time that has not been approved, other than P1 Incident response, which by its nature is undertaken immediately.

7. Optional Trading Freeze

Clients holding a Peak Season Care Plan may elect a trading freeze for the Coverage Period: a written instruction that no changes are to be made to the website during the season.

We recommend it. The period in which a website earns the most is the period in which it can least afford an untested change, and most season-time outages begin with a well-intentioned edit.

During a freeze, the following continue as normal:

• All monitoring, backup and security activity under the foundation Hosting & Care Plan.
• Security patching where a vulnerability is being actively exploited.
• P1 and P2 Incident remediation — repairing what is broken is not a change.

Routine plugin, theme and core updates are held for the duration unless security-critical, and applied in the first scheduled window after the freeze lifts.

A client who wishes to make a change during a freeze may always do so on written request. We will set out the risk in writing beforehand, and written approval is taken as acceptance of that risk. Standard or Off-Hours rates apply.

8. Hosting, Ownership and Portability

Two separate things are often confused: who provides a service, and who owns an asset. This section sets out both plainly.

8.1 What we provide

Hosting is a managed service delivered on Alchemy Imageworks infrastructure. We provision, configure, secure, monitor and maintain the server environment ourselves on modern cloud infrastructure. It is not an account registered in the client's name, and it is not resold shared hosting with a control panel login handed over at signup.

This is deliberate, and it is what makes the rest of this document possible. We cannot guarantee a thirty-minute response on a server we do not control. Managing the environment ourselves is the difference between a commitment and a hope.

8.2 What the client owns

• The domain name, with the client recorded as Registrant. Ownership of the domain rests with the client at all times, and is addressed in full in section 8.3.
• All website files, database content, designs, images, written content and translations are the property of the client.
• Premium plugin and extension licences are purchased in the client's name wherever the licence terms permit. Where a component is supplied under an Alchemy Imageworks agency licence, we disclose that in writing, and the client may purchase their own licence at any time.
• All third-party service accounts — payment processors, analytics, point-of-sale, email marketing, shipping carriers — remain in the client's name at all times.

8.3 Domain registration, administration and transfers

Domain ownership and domain administration are two different things, and it is worth being precise about both.

The client is the Registrant. The domain is registered in the client's name or the name of the client's business, and that record is not changed without the client's written instruction. Ownership is the client's and is never held by Alchemy Imageworks.

Administration is a separate question. Where a client asks us to manage a domain, it is usually held within an Alchemy Imageworks Registrar Account. This is how we keep renewals from lapsing, make DNS changes the same day they are needed, and configure mail, SSL and verification records without a chain of support tickets between three parties.

The practical consequence, stated plainly: while a domain sits in our Registrar Account, transferring it away requires us to act. We must unlock the domain and issue the Authorization Code. No registrar permits a transfer without this step, and any provider who tells a client otherwise is describing a different arrangement than the one they have. We would rather set out the mechanism here than have a client discover it at an inconvenient moment.

Our commitments on this point are as follows.

• On written request from the Registrant, we unlock the domain and issue the Authorization Code within two (2) business days.
• No fee is charged for this, and no reason need be given.
• The request is not made conditional on anything — not on an unpaid invoice, not on a notice period, not on a conversation about why the client is leaving. An outstanding balance is a commercial matter and is pursued as one.
• We will confirm the transfer has completed and assist with DNS continuity so that email and the website do not go dark during the move.
• Registrant contact details are kept accurate and are provided to the client on request at any time.

A client who would prefer to hold the domain in their own Registrar Account may do so, and we will say yes. We then manage DNS through delegated access instead. This is a slightly slower arrangement when an urgent record change is required, and it means renewal deadlines rest with the client, but some businesses prefer it and the preference is a reasonable one. Tell us and we will set it up that way, or move an existing domain out at any time.

One constraint is outside our control and worth knowing about: registry rules impose a 60-day transfer lock following a new registration, a transfer, or a change to the registrant contact details. Where that lock applies we will say so and give the date it lifts. It is a registry rule, not a policy of ours, and we cannot waive it.

8.4 Leaving

A client may leave at any time, and we will help them do it. Hosting with us is a service we would like to keep earning, not a position we intend to hold over anyone.

• On termination we provide a complete current export — full site files, database and a working backup — within ten (10) business days of the final date of service.
• Reasonable assistance with the technical handover to a new provider is included at no charge. Extended migration work beyond that is billable at standard rates.
• Any domain held in our Registrar Account is unlocked and its Authorization Code issued within two (2) business days of a written request, as set out in section 8.3.
• DNS is pointed away at the client's direction, on the client's timetable.
• No account, credential, licence, file, export or backup is withheld for any reason, including a payment dispute. Outstanding invoices are pursued as a commercial matter and never by retaining access to a client's property.

9. Hosting Resources and Scaling

A website that outgrows its server is a good problem to have. It means the business is working. What it should never be is a surprise — either a slow website nobody warned you about, or a bill nobody explained. This section sets out how we handle growth.

9.1 Ongoing monitoring

CPU, memory, storage, bandwidth and database load are monitored continuously as part of every Managed Hosting + Care Package. The purpose is to see a trend developing before a client notices a slow site — and well before a customer does.

9.2 What triggers a Resource Review

A Resource Review is prompted by sustained demand, not by a single busy day. A viral post, a product launch, a feature in the press or a strong week in the run-up to a holiday are absorbed within the existing allocation at no additional cost. That is what headroom is for.

We will raise a Resource Review where one of the following holds:

• Server resource usage sits consistently above the current allocation across a period of thirty (30) days or more.
• Storage or bandwidth consumption consistently exceeds the allocation of the current plan.
• Measured site performance degrades in a way that is attributable to resource constraint rather than to a fault or to something we can resolve by optimisation.

Optimisation is always considered first. Where a site can be made faster through caching, image handling, database maintenance or removing an inefficient plugin, we do that before recommending a client pay for more server.

9.3 How a change is handled

• Written notice at least thirty (30) days before any increase takes effect.
• That notice sets out what the usage data actually shows, what resources are recommended and why, the revised monthly figure, and what happens if no change is made.
• No increase is applied without the client's written acknowledgement.
• Increases are never applied retroactively, and there is no automatic overage billing. A client is not charged for a busy month after the fact.
• A client may decline. The site remains on its current allocation — but where an environment is demonstrably under-resourced, we cannot guarantee performance or the response commitments in section 3.1, and we will say so in writing at the time rather than quietly failing to meet them later.

9.4 Temporary and seasonal scaling

Resources can be scaled up for a defined period and returned afterwards, with billing at the higher allocation only for the months it applies. This pairs naturally with the Peak Season Care Plan: capacity is raised ahead of the season, verified during the readiness review, and stepped back down once the season closes.

9.5 Scaling down

This works in both directions. If usage falls consistently and a site no longer needs the resources it is on, we will tell the client and reduce the plan. We do not charge for capacity a website is not using, and we do not wait to be asked.

10. General Exclusions

The following are not covered by a Hosting & Care Plan or by either schedule in this document. Each may be quoted separately.

• Development of new features, pages, templates or designs.
• Content creation: copywriting, translation, transcreation, photography and video.
• The cost of third-party licences, subscriptions and services, which are passed through at cost as set out in section 11.
• Search engine optimisation campaigns, paid advertising, email marketing and social media management.
• Support for third-party platforms outside the website itself, including point-of-sale systems, payment processors, shipping carriers and CRMs. We will diagnose where a fault lies and will liaise with the relevant vendor at the applicable hourly rate.
• Remediation of faults arising from changes made to the site by the client or any third party, which is billable at the applicable rate.
• Recovery from a hosting or third-party service failure beyond our reasonable control — though every reasonable effort is made, and backups are maintained for exactly this purpose.
• Formal training sessions. Incidental guidance during the course of support is included as a courtesy.

11. Third-Party Costs

Some websites depend on paid third-party services. These are recurring costs of operating the website, not fees charged by Alchemy Imageworks, and are billed at cost with no markup. They are identified and estimated in writing before any commitment is made. Depending on the site, they may include:

• Premium plugin and extension licensing, renewed annually.
• Multilingual, multi-currency, duty and tax calculation services.
• Inventory synchronisation, booking engines and shipping-rate providers.
• Email hosting and transactional email delivery.
• Backup storage and security services beyond those included in the hosting plan.

Renewal dates for every such service are tracked by Alchemy Imageworks and reported in advance of renewal.

12. Client Responsibilities

For the response commitments in this document to be meaningful, we ask the following of clients holding either schedule.

• Nominate one primary contact authorised to approve work and incur cost. A secondary contact may be named for a Peak Season Coverage Period.
• Report P1 Incidents by telephone. Email is not monitored outside Business Hours, and an emergency sent by email cannot be guaranteed a response.
• Keep registrant contact details current, and keep payment methods on client-held accounts current.
• Give notice before installing, updating or removing any plugin, or before granting website access to any other party.
• Provide content, images and approvals needed for scheduled work in reasonable time.
• Keep the account current. Where an invoice remains unpaid beyond 30 days, services other than backup and security monitoring may be suspended on written notice.

13. Fees and Billing

• The foundation plan and the Extended Care Plan are invoiced monthly in advance. Annual billing is available at the same total amount, consolidated into a single invoice.
• The Peak Season Care Plan is invoiced in full at the start of the Coverage Period.
• Where both schedules are held, the Extended Care Plan is not billed during the Coverage Period.
• Hourly work is invoiced in the month following completion. Payment terms are net 15 days.
• Hosting plan changes arising from a Resource Review take effect only after written notice and acknowledgement, as set out in section 9.

14. Term, Renewal and Termination

• The Extended Care Plan runs month to month alongside the foundation Hosting & Care Plan and may be cancelled with thirty (30) days written notice.
• Notice given during an active Peak Season Coverage Period takes effect at the end of that period, so that cover is not withdrawn mid-season.
• The Peak Season Care Plan is a separate seasonal commitment, confirmed at least thirty (30) days in advance, and is non-refundable once the readiness review has been performed.
• Neither schedule may be held without an active Managed Hosting + Care Package.
• On termination, section 8 governs the return of all accounts, credentials and files.

14.1 Fair use

The response commitments here are made in good faith and assume a normal volume of requests. Should P1 Incidents exceed three in a month for two consecutive months, and the underlying cause lie within the client's control or with a third party, both parties will meet to agree a remedy rather than allow the situation to continue unaddressed.

15. Limitations

Alchemy Imageworks applies reasonable skill and care to all work under these schedules. We cannot guarantee uninterrupted availability of a website, as this depends in part on third-party hosting, network and service providers. Where a failure originates with such a provider, we pursue resolution on the client's behalf and, where necessary, restore the site from backup.

Liability under either schedule is limited to the fees paid by the client in the three months preceding the event giving rise to the claim. Neither party is liable to the other for indirect or consequential loss, including loss of profit or anticipated revenue.

16. Acceptance

Please indicate which schedules are being taken, complete the details below, and sign.

Alchemy Imageworks  |  Stony Plain, Alberta  |  780-983-6051  |  alchemyimageworks.com

Offered subject to our standard Terms & Conditions. Pricing valid for 60 days from the date of issue.