Hi,

I am planning my webhost venture, and one thing that I need to better understand is the support effort needed.

Based on your experience, what is the percentage of tickets per month, considering your client base?

For instance, certain host company has 1000 customers, and has 100 tickets a month.. this means 10% ...

Then I can better plan the effort on support versus my number of client...

Your input and comments are welcome :-)

It'll vary on numerous factors - the services you offer, if you have a few clients who like to submit numerous tickets, etc.

I would say your support needs will be low initially - once you hit 100~ or so clients you'll need to start watching tickets and support requests a bit more diligently.

The answer to this question GREATLY varies depending on the type of customer you choose to target. If you offer 1tb/5tb for $1.99/month you can expect to get a LOT of tickets.

If you offer 10gb/50gb for $8.00 you can expect to receive a lot less tickets than you would with the other above example.

Of course this is not set in stone, I just give you these examples to give you an idea of how much it can vary.

Hi,

my target will not be the cheapest, war price thing.

I am looking after developers and companies who would like a web presence.

I am not after young customers to host game, cheap prices to attract people, etc...

I am also not interested in the number that could apply for my target. I do understand that it will varies from a number of reasons, from the knowledge of the customers to the quality of my server..

But, what I would like to hear is from YOUR experience. In this way, I can collect several numbers and do an average of expected tickets per month, considering the cliente base.

This is an important item in my business plan...

Thanks for the support so far guys.. please keep posting.

Cheers.

Hi,

any numbers for me?

Please help me on fill this item on my business plan.

I saw in some posts here that we should have a business plan, etc... therefore I need some help from the more experienced guys...

Thanks. Marcos.

Props to you for recognizing the importance of putting together a business plan.

I'm just afraid to say that you're probably not going to find a definitive answer to your question as it varies tremendously from company to company.

Three different companies in operation on my end (ssl's, dedicated servers and shared hosting), all three have BIG differences in the support required. Dedicated servers (some months) we're lucky to recieve 10 tickets in the month, but then if other times we can have 10 tickets just from ONE of those users when they are "playing" and screw something up.

Same with shared hosting. I find myself paying staff to sit and wait for issues to come up, but if I didn't have the staff there, the issues would be constant. Some days are wonderful, some days are a nightmare. Planning a day off as one day is less busy than another is rare as the web is 24/7. Lighter loads for us during the midnight hour for the most part, but there's some nights where the tickets and phones continue to pour in.

CodyRo has it dead on, once you have over 100 active clients it really is an absolute must to make sure your tickets are attended to and your resolving concerns, otherwise you could find yourself with a lot higher churn rate which would slow your businesses growth.

In this market not only do you need to provide cheap affordable services, but you also need to provide value added support.

hi,

does this mean that I shouldn't plan dedicated staff for tickets until I have ~100 customers, and treat them as case-by-case (which mean, a part time job, and the other part can be used to maintain the server and etc...)?