Hi

Here I am thinking of offering 4 free support tickets each and every month per site. Any support ticket sent in over the 4 for that month would attract a charge, say $5.

No fee would be charged if the problem was at our end.

That way a guy that needs a lot of hand holding to get his site working and keep it running, would be paying for that high level of support.

Other more competent customers would save money by not paying for support which they do not need.

Your ideas!

Regards
Michael

With most of the hosts offering free support I think that would hurt your business. It would most likely make people choose another host that has free hosting since they are in abundance.

I totally agree with Andyc.

Also consider that support might be one of your greatest assets and will make your clients bring more clients ....

At 5$ a ticket I gat get another host provider ... ;)

Please do not hurt yourself ( ... let others :D )

Good luck

Hi
Yes I understand that this could turn away customers looking for "unlimited" support.

There I got the word unlimited in to a post.

Also those customers that are looking to pay $5 a month for unlimited everything including unlimited support, also tend to be the ones that shout the loudest when things go wrong. Most of the time the fault is with them!, not the host.

Regards
Michael

I think that method of support would be best suited to a high-end expensive hosting arrangement, where most of your clients probably won't need too much support and thus will be happy in the knowledge that they're effectively paying less, because they're not paying for 'unlimited' support.

As for the "average" web hosting client, I'd say it would be quite a turn-off in such a competitive market.

Ya I agree !! It would be a very bad move on the marketing side of things with the way the hosting industry is at the moment!! On the other hand If you were targeting clients in the more expensive corporate sectors where quality of service is extremely important it may not be such a bad idea. :D :D

But I agree with the previous post's if you were offering hosting for $9.99 a month it would probably turn away a lot if not all of your potential customers!!

And you will have a hard time discussing with your customers if the support questions was caused by your fault or their fault...

Hi Michael96,

The others are right. It is almost unheard of for a web hosting company to charge for supporting regular hosting plans. Hosts who offer dedicated servers charge support fees, but only for certain services and circumstances - and obviously they are offering a 'higher end' service so you would expect to pay. But I can't see virtual hosting customers paying for you to support them when the can get support free from thousands of other hosting companys.

If you have skills with things like PHP/mySQL/Perl/CGI (or windows based scripting/databases) then you could potential offer paid services to your customers in these areas as there are many people who need assistance with installing programs using these technologies - in fact we have had quite a few clients ask if they can pay us to install shopping carts and classifeds etc for them. So offering additional support services such as this is always an option for making more revenue.

It's actually too bad that the pricing for web hosting seems so "competitive" right now. You could follow the NetZero / Juno business method if it were not for that fact.

See, what NZ/ Juno did was charge nothing, or very little for their dial up access (it's like 10$ now). The caveat, other than running their software, is that you must call a technical support service using a 900# -- and you are billed by the minute for technical assistance. They keep the price low, and you pay extra for support is the idea.
You could have limited support (online resources for example) and offer "premium support" for an additional charge.

Unfortunately, it seems that there are so many competitive offers already that include technical support, your price would need to be extremely low (or nothing) to not turn folks off.

But I would think that folks that consistently turn in more than four support requests per month might be in need of some tutoring or "online classes" that your support group could compile (and charge extra for). This would be positive because it expands your online resources (and hopefully reduces support incidents from all clients), and makes your company appear to have more technical content which is a selling point for most people.

I have played around with support models (I come from the outsourced technical support world), and I think the best model I have seen so far is the prevention method for all sides. Of course, I have also seen companies remove clients accounts for being a drain on technical support resources...it is, afterall, one of the resources that are shared amongst all your clients.

Hope I made sense and helped in the discussion ;-)

Byron

Hi

I would like to say thank you to all those that have added to this post.

Having looked again at support and its cost, plus the current hosting market, I see no point in charging for support in general. Other sevices such as web design and managment will be offered for a fee.

We will offer basic frontpage hosting at a price that is above the lowest levels being offered by some hosts and back that up with a full support package. The one thing we do know about is frontpage. It may well be unliked by many in the hosting biz, but Microsoft sure sell a lot of boxes and all those will need a host for their frontpage web site.

Keep our customers happy and we keep our customers!

Regards and thanks again.
Michael

I personaly don't think it would be a wise move to charge extra for support. I don't get many support emails from my customers, well i tend to get quite a lot of emails before they actually sign up but once they have paid they are fine with their accounts, even the ones who have little knowledge of hosting.
As a wise person on here once told me "it's ok to fire your customers" if you get someone who is taking up far too much time asking silly questions you can tell them that you dont think your hosting company is right for them and offer them a refund.
Although be careful how you do it as you dont want any trouble :D

If you planned on outsoucring support and it cost you 50 cents a month per customer. ( just an example price ) I could see charging like $1.00 for email support and if you outsourced phone support making them pay for what they use..