I wwas thinking about giving my NOC staff the week off between xmas and new year's and i was looking for comments about the practicality of this on a 24/7 operation
what i would do is this:
forward all urgent calls to a senior tech pager
do batch orders once per day
have 24/7 staff avaliable to handle emergencies (outages and such)

we did this last year but my webhosting business was essentially only three months old at that time (we primarily only did dedicated servers for the last 6 yrs) however its a year later and there are 15,000 new webhosting clients to think about. thoughts?

Steve

hmm.. steve, what happens with email questions then ?

my thought was in the autoresponder you get when you email us it will state "if this is an emergency please re email emergency@whateverdomain, if not our hard working staff is taking a few days off please give us until the 1st to answer your email's" or something like that


Steve

I don't see any reason why not!! As long as you have people available for emergencies, which you said you did, there shouldn't be any problems. Some clients will get peeved, but those are the clients which will always get peeved no matter what you do.

Originally posted by Keeg
my thought was in the autoresponder you get when you email us it will state "if this is an emergency please re email emergency@whateverdomain, if not our hard working staff is taking a few days off please give us until the 1st to answer your email's" or something like that


Steve i see... personally i don't like autoresponders :) but maybe you need a more detailed FAQ page and have the autoresponder link to that FAQ page for non emergency matters ? Some people can be impatient :D

Steve - In my personal opinion you guys deserve a week off. Or at least have 1 support tech in the office each day. It's only fair you guys get a holiday after all the hard work you guys do.

Keep up the fantastic work!.

Steve:

Give them the week off. My guys get it off and I have one to handle emergencies. Anything else I can handle.

Techs deserve time off. They will appreciate it more than you know!

When I was working with a hosting couple years ago, We had 2 weeks off and the owner hired 2 techs from a temporary job placement agency to cover us until everyone got back....

Steve,

Give your staff the week off, but keep a skeleton staff on each day to cover any possible emergencies and keep the response rate up. Pay the skeleton staff double-overtime to keep them on :D I think most prospective customers and current clients would appreciate that it's the festive season and as a result we should all be taking it easy.

Season's greetings to you all.

I am a customer and I'm voting for give the techs some off time. Keeping an emergency email address open in case I really need to get a hold of you is fine. I know that this is 24/7 but life should always come before work.

It always kinda saddens me to see stores and restaurants open Christmas day, and really (I know I do), people sometimes need time away from the job to be with friends and family.

I never give staff any time off. I own them. 24/7. They're mine mine mine mine mine. They are my indentured servants -- nay, I say, they are my slaves, upon whom I bestow the largesse of payment out of the goodness of my heart (and very little of it, I might add).

Uh.

Hmmm.

Back shortly, I think I'm going to have to get out the shackles and barricade the doors again...

Also Steve, on the bright side, I highly doubt anyone would call you on Christmas Day. You may lose a couple sign ups over the phone but hey, ITS CHRISTMAS!