New IT support company - billing unfairly?

[Curio]

Here's the back-story...

I started here about 1 year ago and the server setup was a confusing mess, and the current IT support company was a bit of a shower. We shopped around for another company. Decided on one. They came in and did an audit of the server setup (which was quite expensive) and then quoted us for the work and equipment that would be needed to optimize our configuration and address the various issues we were having. It all looked good, so we went with them.

Now, of course there are going to be some teething issues after a pretty significant server reconfiguration - that was to be expected. However, lots of issues are cropping up that they are billing us for - issues that I feel should have been caught in the audit and therefor included in the quote and initial work. I'm talking DNS replication problems, DHCP issues, AD problems, GP problems, and other stuff that is beyond my level of understanding. Shouldn't these problems have been caught in the audit and/or addressed during the initial reconfig work? It seems pretty unfair to me.

We've already questioned some of this stuff and they have credited us back on a few things, but it just keeps coming. It's been 3 months since they came in, and finally in the past couple of weeks things seem to have stabilized and we've had no issues at all. We've still got a pile of questionable bills though....which of course they're chasing and charging interest on.

Is this pretty typical of how things work? Or did we manage to choose an even worse shower than the previous lot?

 

[Curio]

Thanks guys,

It's one server box running 3 VM's. The original config was 3 boxes + VM's....using 2 old servers for this and that....it was very odd. We're a small company - about 15 workstations.

Let me give you a couple of examples:

A while after the reconfig, they said "oh, you have DHCP on this VM and it should really be on this VM - it's not "best practice" and might be causing issues". To me, that should have been noticed during the audit and certainly when the tech was setting everything up. We got billed for it.

They discovered a bunch of minor issues from when we had a power cut and the UPS failed (before the new lot came along). This wasn't picked up during the audit or the reconfig, but a tech later on found it in 2 seconds while looking into something else....think he was running some scan/report type thing. We got billed for fixing these issues.

We have an "essentials" type contract as opposed to a "fix everything" for a flat fee. However, it doesn't change the fact that some of the stuff should have been caught earlier. Right?