When something stops working and nobody is there
It usually happens at an awkward time. The customer portal shows an error. The hosting provider emails that the account has expired. A routine update was applied and the site now shows a blank page. The person who built it does not answer, and the staff member who “knew a bit about it” has left.
Emergency Recovery is the short path out. You tell us the one thing that is broken and request a quote. We start as soon as the agreement is signed, restore service, and write down what we found so the next person is not starting from zero.
What Emergency Recovery covers
Emergency Recovery is for apps and sites that are down because of an error, a crash or neglect. Typical examples:
- An expired SSL certificate.
- An expired domain or hosting account.
- A full disk.
- A crashed database or file store.
- A broken deploy or update that needs to be rolled back or repaired.
- A host that forced a PHP or runtime upgrade, and the application no longer runs.
- A dead server.
- Lost access to hosting, such as a former developer’s account that owns it.
We agree the named failure in writing before we begin. That keeps the scope clear.
If you think you were hacked
If you think you were hacked, we are not the right first call. Contact an incident response firm. Emergency Recovery does not cover compromised systems, malware or ransomware. We can help later with the ordinary recovery work once a response firm has finished.
Temporary write access, in an emergency only
We normally work read-only first. In an emergency, restoring service may need write access. In that case we ask for temporary write access under a signed emergency agreement. It is scoped to the named failure, limited in time, and you can end it at any point. Everything we change is written down.
What you get
- A fast start. Work begins as soon as the emergency agreement is signed.
- Service restored. We focus on getting the named failure fixed, not on a long investigation.
- A short written note. What was wrong, what we changed, what we saw along the way and what we would look at next. If we found other problems, we describe them. We do not fix them without your approval.
- Access in your hands. If the failure was lost access, the recovered access is set up in accounts you own.
What Emergency Recovery is not
- It is not an investigation of everything wrong with your software. For that, start with a Takeover Assessment.
- It is not an incident response service. If you believe someone has misused your systems, contact an incident response firm.
- We commit to the one named failure. If the repair turns out to be larger than expected, we tell you what we found and quote the remainder before doing more.
How we handle it
We tell you at the start that the work is AI-assisted and human-reviewed. Tools speed up reading unfamiliar code and drafting the repair, and a person checks everything before it reaches your live system. We ask for your written approval before any change to production, and we hold access only in a credential vault you own.
What a named failure looks like
A named failure is one sentence. For example: “Staff cannot log in to the order portal.” Or: “The member website is not reachable and the registrar account is in a former contractor’s name.” Or: “The last update left the application showing a blank page.” If you cannot yet describe it that way, send us what you see and we will help you name it.
Ready when you are
Request a quote and choose “Emergency: my app is down”. We reply by email with a yes or no and a start date.
