What is the longest time that you are willing to wait for a response to your support inquiry. Thanks in advanced

I see this poll is more for the impatient hosting customer. ;) As a single-account hosting customer, anything up to 12 hours is fine, as long as it's not always 12 hours. But for a reseller, anything more than 3-4 hours, any time, is bad. The faster the better, though.

Wow. I would be quite satisfied as a consumer with any of those response times.
I think your expectations of response time are in direct relationship to the type of site you have and how much you pay for your hosting.


*didn't/couldn't vote (rarely enjoyed those types of response times).

I did a poll like this once. It was more like:

- 0-15 Minutes :D
- 15-30 Minutes :eek4:
- 30-60 Minutes :cool:
- 1-3 Hours :)
- 3-6 Hours :erm:
- 6-12 Hours :unhappy:
- 12-24 Hours :confused:
- 24-48 Hours :(
- TOO !@#$%^& LONG!!! :angry:
- Never :bawling:

I would think up to one business day on normal priority inqueries would be fine with me. Obviously, I would prefer 4 to 6 hours. I would expect that high priority messages should be responded to within two hours, assuming the problem is fixed faster (i.e. HTTP crashes on my server, it is fixed in 30 minutes, but it takes a couple hours to determine which tickets came from customers reporting the outage and send a bulk reply)

Most companies can curb response times by setting up forums, news pages, or mailing lists such that they could distribute information in 'mass' quantity.

From my experiences..

@ *****
shortest: 15 minutes (hold on phone)
longest: a few days for a ticket

@ VServers/HostPro
shortest: a few seconds. we had our own support guy :)
longest: a day for little tickets, etc.

@ Interland
shortest: a few seconds. if you call right before your guy's coffee break. ;)
longest: a few days =/

@ Hostrocket
shortest: a few hours
longests: a few days (for tiny tickets)

@ Aletia
shortest: a few minutes
longest: a few days (some urgent, some not. i don't send many tickets)

Those are my experiences. I prefer sometime like vServers/Hostpro if possible. If only they still existed! I like having my own sales guy, my own tech guy, etc. But then again, you gotta dish out the dough.

wow, didn't know people would be that patient. I am opening up our hosting business in June and I was thinking that 30 minutes could be too long for a response.

If your hosting company has a turnaround of 30 minutes, that is very very very good support. But the problem is are you able to provide that? If you can and proven, i will put you on top of my list if i need a host. Right now, VenturesOnline is on top of my list.

Originally posted by DJ
If your hosting company has a turnaround of 30 minutes, that is very very very good support. But the problem is are you able to provide that? If you can and proven, i will put you on top of my list if i need a host. Right now, VenturesOnline is on top of my list.

Why thank you :D. We will be open in early July, still alot of work to be done before we start up.

People really aren't that patient, but very few places respond in 30 minutes, so if you can pull that off, you'll have a lot of happy customers, that is, if you don't have excessive downtime.

Originally posted by ToastyX
People really aren't that patient, but very few places respond in 30 minutes, so if you can pull that off, you'll have a lot of happy customers, that is, if you don't have excessive downtime.

It depends. I get responses after seconds some times. But that's because it's a managed dedicated machine and we forked over a lot of $$.

If I got that kind of response from shared hosting, I'd be estatic!

I think one must differentiate between types of "support inquiries". If the problem is something which is the host's fault -- eg, if the server crashed -- then even five minutes is too long. If, instead, the inquiry is a "how do I do xyz" question, even a couple days might be ok.

My expectations:

8-24 hours for something not urgent ("how do I set up my e-mail account?")

2-3 hours for something urgent ("my site is down")

I would be pretty blown away if I got a response within 10 minutes for anything. :D

For bigger, non-host companies (NetSol, eBay/Half, etc.) I prepare myself to wait 24-72 hours for a non-response. :rolleyes: Can you imagine hosts doing similar things?

Customer: My e-mail account isn't working, it keeps giving me errors.

Host: Thank you for contacting XYZ Host! If you would like to set up an e-mail account, click here . . .

:angry: :angry: :angry:

I forget where I read it, but even if you advertise that all emails are replied to within 12 hours, your customers expect to be answered within 3 hours to be happy.

As others have said, this poll is rather on the short side.

But as long as we're dreaming, who wouldn't opt for the 5-10 minutes?