If we stay hourly, do we go to the back of the line behind your contract clients?

We would rather say this plainly now than have you discover it during an outage. Clients with agreements have response times we are contractually obligated to meet, and their monitoring alerts reach us automatically whether or not anyone has called. Hourly work is scheduled around those commitments.

In practice that usually means same day or next day rather than within the hour, and after hours emergency coverage is not guaranteed at all without an agreement.

Any provider who tells you their hourly clients receive identical priority to their contract clients is either not being straight with you, or is not honoring the agreements they have signed. Neither is reassuring.