I know that there is no standard answer to this. I am trying to expore various business models and would like to see some examples please from people willing to share how much support they seem to average per account they host.

I know this most likely varies widely upon what kind of accounts one hosts and how good the support is (and how good the "non live" ie. FAQ pages etc. help is).

We are thinking about hosting accounts that are a bit more sophisticated than the cut-rate ones, ones that we think will attract more technically educated types. We would expect less tickets per customer but maybe then the tickets that we *do* get would require more time or a more educated tech person to answer.

ie - if you have bottom end beginner accounts, I'd expect a lot of tickets on setting up POP mail. A lot of answers but easy to answer. For more advanced account maybe much less tickets but maybe beyond a "Tier 1" type suport and require us to have more knowledgeable techs available more often. I am a bit worred as I personally feel more out of water providing very advanced support and I could certainly handle simple and moderate questions. I don't plan on doing my own tech support always but it's nice to know that I can...

Any examples such as "we host such and such type of accounts" and tend to get "x" tickets a day/week/month for our x accounts would really help a lot in just passing on some sort of idea what I'm in for.

Thank you -
d.

For our 'technological savvy' type of people we had 2 questions when he signed up. One was if we would clone mail on 26 due to his ISP, and another was I believe ... jailed SSH. These are the only two tickets we received from him, and now he's been with us about 2-3 weeks (both of those tickets were in the first 2 days)

Other customers such as the semi-beginners (know how to work email, but not sure about other website-related) tend to send in like.. 2 tickets a month? Nothing too major.

Keep one thing in mind though, when I say tickets I'm not counting them sending me messages on IRC saying "ROB HELP ME!!!(*@&!(" etc. If you counted those as tickets (even though sometimes they are not even related to the hosting) it would around 8-15 a month.

The completely new people probably send about 10 tickets their first month, and maybe 1 a month every month after. I'm averaging between 1 - 20 tickets a month, and the 20 is only due to having 5 "non technological" sign ups in a week. :)

I hope this helps!

Thank you RefreshNet - you're saying you're averaging 1-20 tiks per account, yes?

I understand the load for new customers is going to be higher, that makes sense. Personally in accounts I have been the end customer on there are a few tickets I submitted to my host when building my site and then nothing for at least a year.

Thank you for the info. :)

d.