Discussions come up occasionally regarding this question, so I thought it might be interesting to get some figures from the web hosts here about how much time they spend providing support.

How long, in hours per month per account, do you spend providing user support?

By "account" I mean whatever you advertise, ie if you advertise plans which allow five domains under the same account that is still only one account; by "providing user support" I mean time actually spent responding to questions or complaints from users, not the amount of time you spend eating doughnuts while you wait for the phone to ring.

Most problems take less than half an hour. I mean what job for a shared hosting account could take more than half an hour? I know there are a few out there but on average I think 10 minutes is all the time I spend.

Hi Cperciva:
-quite often less than 10 mns
-10% require between 10 and 30 mns,

I don't think we ever had to spent more on any of our clients.
However, do you count several support requests by the same client as one big support action?

I've noticed we tend to accumulate such support calls when the client's question is something like: "But what IS SSH? Non I won't read the members support area, I don't have time" :(

Err, the question was "time per account per month", not "time per support query".

Make sure you're answering the right question. ;)

Oh, crap.
So, I'm the one who didn't read, this time.

I would say average 40 mns per account, but it varies so much...some clients NEVER ask for anything, some ask once or twice a day...

Well don't worry. The question was stated in bad english.

Originally posted by netsolutions
Well don't worry. The question was stated in bad english.

:angry:

What was wrong with the way I stated the question?

In many areas of hosting the "question" centers around individual single "items/tasks/services", which often is impossible to quantify, rather than 'the whole thing'.

As cyansmoker said each account is different .. we have many accounts who never contact us..not even with a pre-sales question... Then there are the other accounts who seemed to of found a way to move into our support desk and chit chat all day everyday :D

Maybe the following will offer something like you're looking for ?

Clients == Number of human contacts not number of domains (one 'client' that hosts 20 domains requires less support than 20 clients with one domain each...so I count people rather than accounts)

Emails == Support/Sales/Billing all-in-one

From what I've observed in our own support box, we can assume 5% of our clients is equal to the number of emails we will receive each day. Note this is with a lot of online documentation and active public message forums being available to the clients, without these services I'm sure the number would be much higher. When planning for future growth I currently use the 5% rule to guesstimate how many emails will be received in a day. Being aware that weekends/holidays will generate less and downtime or other issues will of course generate more.

For those trying to decide what to expect..the above has proven to be a good "guide line" for us. I'd be curious how it stands up compared to the other hosts here? I'm sure there will be differences...

The question reads fine to me...

I suppose there will always be some clients who need more support than others - maybe if they are new to hosting, and afraid of 'breaking something' by testing various things out. And yet some others will not need any support over the month....

Originally posted by M@tt
I suppose there will always be some clients who need more support than others - maybe if they are new to hosting, and afraid of 'breaking something' by testing various things out. And yet some others will not need any support over the month....
That's exactly why I was looking for people to report the average time per account (ie, time spent divided by # of accounts); "an average client takes 15 minutes/month of support time" is much more useful than "some clients take several hours per month, and some don't take any".

About 10 minutes per month per shared account here. It really depends on the client, but that's what it averages out at -- yes we've even had a few clients who have never sent in a request for support, not even once!

10-20 minutes per client per month is a good estimate.
But as everybody mentioned it would depend a lot on how pampered your clients are. What kinds of sites they host. How stable the servers are etc....

Have a great day :)

Regards
amar

I want to know the person who has to spend an average of 5 hours per client on support. There must be some big problems there