Who may act on your account
At three in the morning, the question “is this person allowed to ask for a reboot?” should already have an answer.
Why this exists
We will not act on instructions from someone we cannot tie to your account — see keeping your account secure. That protects you, and it is an obstacle precisely when you can least afford one: the person who normally deals with us is asleep, on a plane, or no longer at the company.
Authorised contacts remove that obstacle in advance.
Setting them up
Send support the names, email addresses and what each person may do. We record them against the account. Add them when they join, not when you need them.
Useful distinctions:
- Technical
- May open tickets, request reboots and hardware work, discuss configuration. Usually the largest group.
- Billing
- May discuss and pay invoices, change billing details. Often a different person entirely, and often should not be able to order a reinstall.
- Administrative
- May change the account itself: add and remove contacts, change the main address, agree to contracts. Keep this list very short.
- Emergency
- Reachable out of hours, and who we should call when something needs a decision at an awkward time.
Give us a way to reach a human
A role mailbox that several people read beats one person's address, because people go on holiday and mailboxes do not. Make sure our notifications are actually read: the most common reason a customer is surprised by maintenance is a notification sent to an address nobody opens. See maintenance and notice.
When somebody leaves
Tell us the same day. We remove them from the account, and anything they could have asked us to do, they can no longer ask. In parallel, do the rest of it on your side: SSH keys, sudo, deploy keys, API keys — the checklist in users and sudo.
This is the step that gets forgotten, and it is the one that matters most. A former colleague who can still open a ticket with us is a risk you are carrying for no benefit.
Resellers
If you resell our capacity, your customers are yours and we do not deal with them directly. We take instructions from you about your machines, and we will not discuss your account with your customer or your customer's account with anyone. That boundary is deliberate; it is also why API access exists, so you can put your own panel in front of us.
Keep it current
Look at the list once or twice a year. It takes two minutes and it is always slightly wrong — somebody has moved teams, somebody is no longer there, and the emergency contact is now a mailbox nobody reads.
Still stuck? Mail support@novogara.com — an engineer answers, at any hour. Back to the knowledge base