Providing support for hosted clients

[cherie]

Since I started hosting, I've felt chained to my email. I have a support email that goes out to me and a couple of my contractors, but I'm finding that the universe seems to want to mock me with that. There's almost never a time one of us isn't around a computer, but sure enough, last week I'm just getting back from the hospital where a family member had open-heart surgery, exhausted, feeling like crap, quick check of my email before going to nap and I find that one of my clients has managed to break her site with a typo in her .htaccess file at some exact time a couple hours before when NONE of us were available. First time anyone has used that email address in months, and no one was around to answer it.

I started looking last night at outsourcing tech support. The names XeSupport, BobCares, and Webby Cart kept coming up, as well as a few others. Most of these offer WAY more support than I need, although a few at least offer smaller, per-ticket packages. Affordable, although with most it seems I'd still be paying for 10+ tickets a month when I probably wouldn't get that many in a year. Worth it for the peace-of-mind, but I wanted to ask around to see if there are other options.

I'm spoiled with GlowHost support. If you guys offered end-user support, I'd happily pay your per-hour fee per incident knowing I'd get quality support and wouldn't have to worry about handing over access to my server to some strange company. But until that's a possibility, anyone have any recommendations? If I got a lot more tickets, it would make sense to just find people I trust and pay them to be on-call, but given how rarely I get tickets, it seems the best option is to find a reliable company who does this anyway and does always have someone available...

[Matt]

Hi Cherie,

Welcome to the forums and congrats on your first post. While I can't personally recommend any of those above since I have not tried them, I think if you can find a company that will do "per ticket" then that would definitely give you some piece of mind. I know bob cares has been around a long long time. They originally were all based out of India but I am told they have US support now.

These types of companies are not usually going to be really great about knowing your companies policies and preferences and rarely remember special instructions, however, for things like an .htaccess problem they can definitely be a good first line of support.

As for other options, it really depends on your budget and how many hours you want to have coverage. I think most successful resellers start out where you are and get a per ticket plan until they find that they need more than that.