Terms of business

Who you are contracting with

Dalaric Limited, registered in England and Wales, company number 06995683. Registered office: 4 South Terrace, South Street, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1DE. VAT registration number GB976731280.

You can reach me at info@dalaric.com or on +44 (0) 1935 873985.

What these terms cover

Six different things get sold, and they do not all work the same way:

• Consultancy: advisory sessions, technical reviews, website security reports, and pieces of work scoped and quoted in advance
• WordPress hosting and care plans
• One page websites on your own domain
• Brochure websites, which are the same thing with more pages and are built to order
• Business email at your own domain
• Domain registration and management

Where a clause below applies to only some of those, it says so.

Prices and VAT

There are two conventions, and the label goes next to the price rather than in a footnote.

• Prices are held without VAT, and the one page website and mailbox pages quote the figure with it added, billed annually. A sole trader reading £99 should find that £99 is the amount that leaves the account.
• Everything else is quoted excluding VAT, brochure websites included, which is the right convention for work sold to businesses.

Current prices are published on how I work and on the websites page rather than repeated here, so there is one copy of each number.

Published prices can change, and a price you are already paying cannot change inside the year you have paid for. If a renewal is going to cost more, I will tell you at least thirty days before it renews, so there is time to decide rather than a surprise on a bank statement. If you would rather not continue at the new price, you leave and nothing further is owed.

Work that has been quoted is quoted. A number I gave you does not move because a published price moved after you accepted it.

What is yours, and what is not

This is the clause most likely to matter later, and there is no single answer to it.

Consultancy and infrastructure work

Everything is in your name. Your cloud account, your servers, your DNS, your domain, your logins, your data. I have access rather than ownership, and you can revoke it whenever you like.

WordPress hosting

The server is mine and is shared between clients, which is why the price is what it is. Yours are the domain, the content, the database and the files, and you can have a full export of all of it whenever you ask rather than only on the way out.

Websites, one page and brochure

The site runs on infrastructure I own. The domain is registered in your name and belongs to you.

Domains, in every case

Registered in your name, with your address and your contact details. You are the registrant. For a .uk or .co.uk you can ask Nominet to move the domain to another provider directly, without my agreement and without needing anything from me.

Who owns the work itself

What was made for you is yours, once it is paid for. Bespoke code, configuration, infrastructure definitions and the documents written about your systems all belong to you on payment in full, and you can take them, change them, or hand them to somebody else without asking me.

What I brought with me stays mine. The tools, scripts, templates and methods I had before your job started, and the general skill and knowledge I take away from it, are not sold with the work. Where any of that is built into what you have, you get an unlimited licence to keep using it as part of your systems, for as long as you like, at no further cost. What you cannot do is extract it and sell it on as a product of your own.

Other people's components keep their own licences. Open source libraries, themes, plugins and fonts come with terms set by whoever wrote them, and neither of us can change those.

The one page website product is the exception worth naming: the content is yours and the domain is yours, and the template and the platform it runs on are mine and are shared with everyone else on it.

How work is agreed

Consultancy work is scoped before it is priced, and priced before it starts. You get a number in advance and it does not move because something took longer than I thought. Almost everything begins with a review, because what a system actually is and what its documentation says it is are usually two different things.

What I do not sell is an open ended time commitment: no retainer of named days, no standing block of the week, and no day rate.

A quote is accepted when you say so in writing, and an email saying yes is writing. Nothing starts before that, and I would rather ask twice than assume once. A quote holds for thirty days unless it says otherwise on the quote.

If the work turns out to be different from the work we agreed, it stops and you get a new number before it carries on. That applies whether the change came from you, from me, or from something neither of us knew was there, which is the usual case. You will not receive an invoice for extra work nobody asked you about first.

Payment

The annual products are invoiced before the year they cover, and the service starts once the invoice is paid. Websites, mailboxes and domains all work that way. WordPress hosting can be paid that way too, or monthly in advance.

Consultancy is invoiced when the piece is finished, or at points agreed in advance for anything large enough that a single invoice at the end would be unreasonable for either of us. An advisory session is invoiced after the session.

Invoices are payable within fourteen days. Bank transfer is the usual method and the details are on the invoice.

A late invoice carries statutory interest and compensation under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998, which is eight per cent above the Bank of England base rate plus a fixed sum per invoice. I would far rather ring you than invoke it, but it is the legal position and you should know it now rather than find out later.

If an invoice goes unpaid and unexplained, I may suspend a service until it is settled. You get told before that happens, not afterwards.

Support, and what a response window means

Email raises a ticket, which is the record. WhatsApp is for quick questions, and anything that turns into real work gets moved into a ticket and you are told so. A booked call is a video call, with phone on request.

Published response windows on WordPress care plans are 3, 2 and 1 working days by tier, and they describe how quickly I answer a question or make a change. They are a separate thing from monitoring, which runs around the clock on those plans, where server and site level faults are acted on whenever they happen. Monitoring around the clock applies to WordPress care plans and does not read across to anything else.

Those windows are a target I hold myself to rather than a guaranteed service level with money attached. There is no service credit scheme and no automatic refund if one is missed, and I am not going to invent one in order to sound bigger than I am.

What happens when I miss one is that I tell you, rather than hoping you did not notice. If missing them becomes a pattern rather than a bad week, that is a good reason to leave and I would not argue with you about it.

Ending it

You can leave whenever you want. For the annual products there is no exit fee and no notice period beyond the year you have paid for. Hosting paid monthly needs a month's notice, and nothing more. Systems are documented, infrastructure is defined as code where it can be, and I will hand over cleanly and help whoever comes next.

Leaving part way through a year does not refund the rest of it. The annual products are priced as a year and the year runs to its end, so you keep the service until it expires and simply do not renew. There is no exit fee and no notice period to observe. Tell me whenever you like, including on the last day.

I can end an arrangement too, and the grounds are narrow. An invoice unpaid and unexplained, a serious or repeated breach of the acceptable use policy, or being asked to do something unlawful. Outside those three, I give at least ninety days' notice, because you would need time to move and it would be my choice rather than yours.

However it ends, you get a full export of what is yours and I will help whoever takes over. That is not conditional on why you left.

Liability

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes a liability that the law does not allow to be limited or excluded. That includes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, and for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation.

Subject to that, my total liability to you for any one engagement is limited to what you paid me for it in the twelve months before the thing that gave rise to the claim. For an annual product that is the year's fee. For consultancy it is the fee for that piece of work. The limit follows the size of the contract on purpose, because the work runs from a £99 website to infrastructure a business depends on, and one figure across that range would be wrong at one end or the other.

I am not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, business, goodwill or anticipated savings, however it arises.

Advice is my opinion, and what you do with it is your decision. An advisory session, and the written summary after it, is my professional opinion on what you told me and showed me in that session. I do not check anything beyond that unless we agree a review, and talking about your systems or your suppliers does not make me responsible for them. Whether you act on the advice, and how, is up to you, and so is the result. If you or somebody else carries out work because of it, that work is theirs and not mine. The advice is for you and your business, and nobody else may rely on it. If it turns out to be wrong, the most you can recover from me is what you paid for that advice, under the limit above.

Your data. If data I look after is lost or damaged because of something I did or failed to do, what I will do is restore it from whatever backup that product includes, if it includes one, at no charge. Beyond that, keep your own copy of anything you could not afford to lose. The export described above is there so that you can.

Things outside my control. I am not liable for a failure or delay caused by something outside my reasonable control, including a fault at a supplier, a data centre, a network or a domain registry, provided I tell you about it and do what I reasonably can to work around it.

This is business to business, so these limits have to be reasonable under the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977. I think they are: they scale with what each engagement costs, they leave you a remedy for anything I get wrong, and they do not touch anything the law says cannot be excluded.

Who I sell to

I sell to businesses and organisations rather than to consumers. That includes sole traders and partnerships buying for their trade, and it includes charities, schools, clubs, associations and other bodies that are not businesses but are plainly not private individuals either. A one page website suits that last group particularly well.

What I do not take on is a purchase for something outside any trade or organisation: a personal project, a hobby, a band, or a site for a group where one person is paying for it out of their own pocket rather than on behalf of the group. Those are consumer purchases and they come with a different set of rules that I am not set up to meet.

Being clear about why, because it is not sleight of hand. A consumer has statutory rights that arrive with the person rather than with the contract, including a fourteen day cancellation right on anything bought at a distance. That sits badly against a website that gets built and handed over inside a week, so rather than write terms that quietly try to opt out of rights nobody can opt out of, I do not sell into that situation at all.

And if one gets through anyway, those rights still apply, whatever this page says. A clause claiming you agreed you were not a consumer does not make you one thing or the other. What decides it is what you were actually buying it for.

Governing law

These terms and any dispute arising out of them are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

Before either of us reaches that point, ring me. Almost everything that looks like a dispute at nine in the morning is a misunderstanding about scope, and it is cheaper and quicker for both of us to find that out on the phone.

Related

The privacy notice covers information about people. The cookies page covers what this site stores on your device, which is nothing. The acceptable use policy covers what may be run on hosting and email.