I am looking to expand my offerings to shared hosting and I was wondering about customer support requirements.
For instance, if we take, say 100 customers, who are a diverse group (from beginners to experts) how many support queries to they usually send per month (if the service is operating normally, so no downtime or anything bad happening)?

Thanks

we hosts for thousands domains, and dont have many tickets per day. it's around 1-10 new tickets per day. If system is working fine, 100 customers, I guess you can handle yourself, don't need to ask for another tech, of course, if you know what you're doing :)

Thanks for answering, it's good to know this. I thought the number would be higher :)

But at the same time be ready for peaks (DDos etc)
I would suggest you keep in pocket third party outsource company for such cases.

From my experience new customers need more support than the old ones. If you are acquiring customers fast I would expect a higher number of tickets than the usual.

make sure you provide tutorials for your customers to follow to decrease the number of tickets you receive.

Thanks very much for the advice. I will definitely follow it. I think taking it slow for a while will be the best for me, don't want to rush things. Hopefully this will give me some experience with helping customers better.

About tutorials this is a must I agree, I will be documenting some FAQs, that I found on other sites and I will also point people to flash demos for control panels.

Thanks again.

I would say 1 ticket per 100 customers, average, per day.

--Tina

Ticket Volume:
A well-run infrastructure, effective knowledgebase, and tutorials will allow your customers to solve the vast majority of issues on their own. Providing customers the tools to do so has gone a long way in terms of ticket volume.

Additionally, customer tickets provide the best feedback in regards to your infrastructure (standard firewall rule sets, auto-provisioning issues, etc.) It is an excellent support practice for technical management to review all support tickets submitted and resolved overnight so as to quell any underlying issues within the system.

We were pleasantly surprised to find that the volume of tickets per customer has been very low across VPS, Dedicated, and Shared Hosting products. The suggestion listed earlier in regards to having measures in place to handle volume in adverse times (connectivity issues, etc.) is a very good one.

A few good suggestions for high-volume times are:
- Arrange with a call center to "failover" in times of high volume. There are many excellent ones in the US and Canada. You can find them on WHT.

- Host backup forums and support desk via DNS failover at a geographically diverse location

Thanks, I am glad to know that people usually read tutorials and watch video prior to contacting support. I was actually thinking most first submit a ticket and then find tutorials. It's good to know, that if I take this slow there will not be a flood of people sending tickets.

The answer depends greatly on your clients and offerings as well.

IE, if you are a host that caters specifically to newbees, you are going to run into more questions, or on the opposite end a host that specifically attracts programmers get less (but more complicated) questions.

So you really have to aim yourself to what you want to support, then grow from there.

And pricing comes into play as well. DO NOT handcuff yourself by pricing yourself out of the ability to fully handle your accounts and support your clients right. Hosts should not underbut pricing and then turn around and they can't support their users (nevermind pay for their servers and get ready for upgrades).

Get a few good paying clients and grow from there! Price your services what they actually cost, manhours included.

take care

After the 100 customers have all been setup and assuming your servers keep good uptime, I wouldn't expect to see more than 1 or 2 trouble tickets per day from that number of customers.

We have approx. 500 clients and only 5 support tickets and 20-22 e-mails got generated for support in last 1 year. Luckily the stability, uptime and network of Atjeu keeping troubles and tickets away from us :D

Thanks everyone, this statistic will surely help me estimate costs and price packages respectively.
I am quite surprised though, that people usually post so few tickets, I though there would be a constant stream of questions :)

But at the same time be ready for peaks (DDos etc)
I would suggest you keep in pocket third party outsource company for such cases.

Now that happens rarely and its all due to mis management from the Admin side.

I do agree with the amount of tickets that can be expected in this thread. It's around 1-2%.

You can expect one to two tickets a day. But sales ticket maybe more than that if your marketing is aggresive.