What is remote hands and when do you need it?

Remote hands is our on-site engineers doing physical work on your colocated hardware so you don’t have to travel to the data center. You need it whenever something in your rack needs a person, and the person you’d otherwise send is hours away or asleep.

It’s the part of colocation people forget to ask about until 2 a.m.

What remote hands covers

At our Chicago facility, engineers are on site 24/7/365. Typical requests look like this:

• Rebooting a server that’s stopped responding
• Swapping a failed drive for a spare you’ve shipped in
• Reseating a loose or damaged cable

For anything bigger than a quick task, describe it up front so we can quote it properly.

What it costs

Every Chicago colocation package includes free time. The 1U, 2U and half rack packages come with 1 hour, and the full rack comes with 2. Time beyond that is quoted on request, so ask before you need it and you won’t have a surprise on the invoice.

How fast someone gets to it

Remote hands is covered by our Support and Remote Hands SLA. A written request gets a response within 30 minutes, or 15 minutes on a managed plan, and if we miss that you can claim a service credit.

When you need it, and when you don’t

You need remote hands for physical problems on hardware you own: a dead drive, a hung machine with no working out-of-band access, a cable someone knocked loose. You don’t need it for anything you can fix over the network, so set up remote console access before the server ships.

On a dedicated server, the hardware is ours. A failed part falls under our hardware replacement SLA, not remote hands time.

My advice: ship a spare drive with the server, label everything, and write a one-page runbook for the engineers. A clear request gets fixed faster, and a fast fix is the whole point.

FAQ

Planning a move into colocation and want the remote hands terms in writing? Request a quote with your hardware list.