Fortune_Hunter - 9:57 pm on May 28, 2009 (gmt 0)

If any of my vendors took off for a week without providing cover they would be sacked and sued

Define vendor.

If I build a site for you and it has been up and running for 3 months with no trouble, but you aren't paying me for maintenance or anything and I leave and something does happens then what? Most of my work is warrantied for 30 days after go live. If something occurs after that I fix it and charge or don't charge on a case by case basis depending on what exactly went wrong. I know the argument can be made if there is an error in code, that doesn't for whatever reason, show up for 3 months then I should be obligated to fix it, which I would, but I still don't think that means I must be one phone call away and on the next flight home kind of thing. When working with code sometimes issues take a long time to show up, just look at Microsoft, some of their crap still has errors years later!

The point is it depends on what you are obligated to do as the vendor and how long you warranty your work for. I just believe that every project no matter how big or valuable to the client has limits. Just because I once did business with someone however long ago doesn't obligate me to be available 24/7 forever, no matter what. On the other hand if I have a contract to provide some type of service for a set amount of time or every month and I disappear without making arrangements now they have a legitimate issue.