Who is responsible when your LMS goes down at 9pm?

It depends on which layer failed and when. Your cloud provider answers for the infrastructure under its own service level agreement. Balanita answers for patching, monitoring, backups and response, and for the LMS under Manage, within your support window. Standard support runs on Sri Lanka business hours, so a 9pm outage in Dubai waits until the window opens.

At 9pm in Dubai, it is 10:30pm in Sri Lanka. At 9pm in Doha, it is 11:30pm. That gap is the honest starting point for this post.

Nobody should sign for a managed LMS without knowing what happens at that hour. Below is what happens, who answers for which part and what you can buy to change it. It builds on why the LMS server is managed separately from the platform.

Who is responsible for what when the platform goes down?

Responsibility splits in three. Your cloud provider answers for the underlying infrastructure, under its service level agreement. Balanita answers for the server’s patching, monitoring, backups and response, and for the LMS itself under Manage. You hold the accounts and the cloud bill. Every Balanita contract includes a responsibility matrix that states this.

The uptime row is the one buyers skim past. It is also the one that decides who you call first. If the infrastructure underneath your server fails, the fix belongs to your cloud provider, not to Balanita and not to the platform.

What happens when the platform goes down outside support hours?

Monitoring runs around the clock, so the alert is logged when the site stops responding. Under Standard support, Balanita’s experts act on it when the Sri Lanka window opens. For cover in your own hours, there is Gold support. We would rather you hear this before an outage than during one.

Standard support follows Sri Lanka business hours. The exact hours are stated in your managed service agreement. Here is what that means in Gulf time:

Sri Lanka is UTC+5:30. None of the three places changes its clocks for daylight saving, so the gap stays the same all year.

Here is the same outage under each plan:

Standard support does not cover your evening. That is a fact about the plan, not a flaw we are hiding. Plenty of training can wait until the next morning. Some cannot.

What does Gold support change?

Gold support moves your support window to your own business hours, in your own time zone. Cover beyond those hours, such as a 9pm response, is quoted based on your requirement level. Gold is quoted per client, so there is no list price.

Round-the-clock human response is not part of the standard service. If your training must be supported at night or on a day off, say so on the discovery call, before you sign. We tell you what that cover would involve, and what it would cost, before you commit to anything.

What does Balanita commit to, and what does it not?

Balanita commits to response and recovery times: a critical incident actioned within 2 business hours, security patches within 5 business days and restoration within 4 business hours on request. Balanita does not commit to infrastructure uptime. Your cloud provider’s service level agreement covers that, or your own team if you use your own servers.

The trade-off between one cloud region and two is covered in how LMS data residency works in the UAE and Qatar.

Your cloud provider may also schedule its own maintenance on the underlying infrastructure. It notifies you directly by email. Forward that notice to us, so we can prepare your site for it.

What should you ask any LMS provider about outages before you sign?

Ask six things: what hours the support window covers, in whose time zone, what happens to an alert outside the window, what the response time is for a site that is down, who answers for the infrastructure and how fast a backup can be restored. Write the answers into the contract. Vague answers are a warning.

What should you set up before an outage happens?

Decide in advance who on your side gets the alert, whether your training can survive a wait until the window opens and whether you need cover in your own hours. If a live compliance deadline falls on an evening or a weekend, tell us at the discovery call, so we can scope cover around it.

A short preparation list:

1. Name two people. A key contact and a technical administrator. Both receive ticket system logins.
2. Keep the support route handy. Tickets and support email follow the same window, so keep the address where your team can find it at 9pm.
3. Know your first check. When the site is down, look at your cloud provider’s status page first. Infrastructure incidents are the provider’s to fix.
4. Forward provider notices. Every maintenance email from your cloud provider goes to us.
5. Know your recovery options. Daily backups, kept for 14 days. Restoration on request, within 4 business hours.
6. Decide whether waiting is acceptable. If it is not, ask about Gold or out-of-hours cover before you sign, not after.

What does support cost?

Standard support is included in the Manage price. At Balanita, Manage is US$ 450 a month for up to 500 active learners and US$ 950 a month for 501 to 1,500. Server Management is US$ 150 and US$ 300 a month on the same bands. Gold support is quoted based on your requirement level. Larger bands are quoted too.

Prices are in US dollars and exclude taxes. An active learner is anyone who logs in at least once in the billing month. Annual prepayment gives 12 months for the price of 10, on Manage, Server Management or both. The Balanita pricing page has the full list.

What should you tell us on a discovery call?

Tell us where your learners are, which hours they train in and any date when an outage would hurt. On the free 30-minute call we tell you whether Standard is enough or whether you need Gold, and we say so honestly if we are not the right fit. No platform is named on the call. Your exact first-year cost is confirmed in writing before any payment.