Questions People Actually Ask

It depends on how many machines and users you have and how much cover you want. Ad-hoc support is billed hourly at a rate agreed before work starts. Retainers are priced per environment after a quick assessment, and for anything above roughly five machines, a retainer normally works out cheaper than paying per incident, because problems get caught early instead of becoming emergencies. I'll quote both so you can compare honestly.

On-site: Pretoria (including Pretoria East, Hatfield, Menlyn, Lynnwood, Garsfontein, Silver Lakes, Montana and Akasia), Centurion (including Highveld, Irene, Eldoraigne, Wierdapark and Midstream), Midrand and northern Johannesburg. Remote: anywhere in South Africa. Websites, web apps, hosting, domains and AI work are location-independent.

Typically within 2 to 4 hours during business hours (Monday to Friday, 08:00 to 18:00 SAST), and often much sooner. Remote fixes usually start the same day. On-site visits in Pretoria and Centurion are generally same-day if you call in the morning, or next-morning for later calls.

Mostly businesses, because that's where ongoing support relationships make sense. But I do take on individual work, PC and laptop repairs, data recovery, home office setup, virus removal and personal website builds. If it's a one-off repair, just ask.

Plenty of clients came from one. If you're unhappy, the useful first step is a documentation audit, establishing what you actually have, who holds which passwords, whether backups are running, and when your domain expires. That's valuable whether or not you switch, and it frequently surfaces things nobody knew about.

No. Retainers run month to month with 30 days' notice. I'd rather keep clients because the service is good than because they're locked in. Project work is fixed-price per project with no ongoing obligation.

Often yes, if you call rather than email. Ransomware, a dead server, a website down or an office with no connectivity get treated as urgent and jumped up the queue. Call or WhatsApp 067 137 1638 for anything time-critical, email is checked regularly but the phone is faster.

Fixed-price per project, quoted after a short scoping conversation. A clean 5 to 8 page business site with SEO groundwork is the entry point; e-commerce, logins or custom functionality cost more. Anyone quoting a firm price before understanding your business is guessing. See website development.

Yes, completely. Domains are registered in your business name, and you get the site files, database and credentials on request. This is not universal in the industry. Check who the registrant on your current domain is, because if it's your web designer rather than you, you don't own your web address.

I handle client data carefully and can advise on the practical IT side of POPIA, access controls, encryption, backup handling, retention, who can see what, and securing the systems holding personal information. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't provide legal compliance certification; for that you need a legal advisor. But most POPIA failures in small businesses are technical hygiene problems, and those I can fix.

For a machine under about four years old with a mechanical hard drive, an SSD and RAM upgrade almost always beats replacement on value. Beyond that, or if the motherboard has failed, replacement is usually the better spend. I diagnose and tell you which, including when the answer costs me the repair job.

Standard hours are Monday to Friday, 08:00 to 18:00. Retained clients can arrange after-hours cover for genuine emergencies, and disruptive work like server migrations or network cutovers is deliberately scheduled outside business hours so your staff aren't affected.