How long is too long to wait for a support email to be answered? 24hrs, 48hrs? ... Im sick of waiting 3+ days for a reply to a simple support request, ticks me off :(

After 24hrs I would email them again. It could easly be a mistake like one that happened to me recently. My hosts support system ports certain emails into the ticketing system and their web designer did a typo on the email address for the support so my email went unanswered. When I contacted their live support I found out why. So contact them again.

That's too long to wait for support in my opinion. You might send up a new ticket and state in the new ticket you have sent up a prior ticket that has went unanswered and try to include as much information about the first ticket sent. (I.e. time, date, ticket number . Etc) There are chances that they may have deleted it on accident. You should hear something back within 24 hours atleast, excluding a canned reply. :) as with all things it really depends on the company you are dealing with.

Even 24hrs is way too long to wait. For the hosting service I'm setting up, I'm targeting to have initial replies to support e-mails back to the customers within 5 mins. But we'll see how that goes... :)

Does your hosting provider also have a phone number? If it's important enough, try that other channel and give them a call.

If you dont hear anything back in 24 hours you shouldnt feel bad about re-submitting a ticket. Either they are slow and need to be bugged, or something happened and it got lost. Cant really hurt you either way.

-Brendan

nevermind support queries... how long is too long to wait for a reboot?

I'm currently at 12 hours. (though my first reboot went off reasonably quickly)

That's way too long of a wait for a reboot.

man where are you guys waiting 3 days for support and 12 hours for reboots at?

Heck, 1/2 hour is too long for a reboot!

1/2 hour is way too long for a reboot, and 5 minute reply's for support requests are only realistic when you only have 10 customers and nothing else to do :(

A support request should be answer in less than 24 hours, if the staff has a question, they should be getting it back at you in 1 hour or 2 tops

In my opinion as a customer, 3 hours would be best. 6 hours is acceptable. 10 hours is a bit much. 24 hours? I'd leave the hosting company.

My opinion is 24 hours. If you look at any *other* company on the web, you'd most likely receive a reply within a few days.

Email an on-line shopping place with a problem. You'd most likely be lookingat 24-48 hours.

PacHell DSL takes 3 days to answer support requests and even then, they return canned cut&paste replies with NO way of replying (must resubmit using form), no tracking number, etc.

What you have (with many of the companies in the hosting industry, not all) -is the best customer service the web has to offer. Again, not all, but I'd say, with what I've run across personally.

5 minutes? Assuming you check your mail every minute, and your customer checks their mail every minute, and they ask something like, "What's the path to perl?", and you know it off the top of your head and don't have to look for it, and there is no delay anywhere (servers, networks, etc.), and you are sitting at the computer doing nothing else and don't have anything else to do (no other requests, just sitting there waiting to pounce on emails), then 5 minutes is realistic.

Otherwise, it is setting yourself up for failure. People like when you exceed their expectations. I'd advertise 24 hours, and if you can do 5 minutes, all the best to you. (This took more than 5 minutes to think about and write, and I haven't hit the submit button yet!)

Absolutely correct, my fine feathered friend.

5 minute response time is unrealistic. If you can respond within 24 hours, most people are very satisfied with that. If it is an emergency issue, the response should be 1-3 hours at most, with a shorter time if absolutely necessary. But if it is a real emergency, there is nothing that works better than a simple phone call.

If your host doesn't offer phone service (at least for emergency situations), you may want to reconsider your choice.

Im currently with liquidweb, and havent recived a single ticket answer in the last 10 days, i have sent in 4 tickets...

Im trying to move my site to a dedicated server with serverhost.com, but i havent recived a response to one of mt 3 emails in the last week, and i cant get jeff to answer me in ICQ. Im about ready to give up on the internet, reverse all my charges on the CC, adn let my site die. Im getting seriously ticked with hosting.

Well, my MySQL server went down, so i called liquidweb's 800#, and they rebooted the server within 30 sec after hanging up. Not too bad there, but the total lack of email support totaly sucks.

24 Hrs for replaying is normal? Heh, maybe, i can work with less effort, then... ;) Just kidding. Seriously, all tickets, handled by me, take their answers in 15-30 minutes, regardless of the situation. If it's a real emergency, then - ASAP. This does not include time for email reaching it's destination, ofcourse. And yes, you simply can't promice 5 minutes reaction time to user, if it's not an autoresponder.. But 3 days - way too long.

We usually answer right away, within an hour but usually sooner. It is possible that it may take up to 12 hours or less, but we advertise less than 24. This way, we cover our butts with the 24 hours, make clients happy to know it usually takes less than 12 hours and then actually take care of it in less than an hour. This gives room for error. I would also say that if you do not get an answer within that 24 hours, contact us again, because something happened.

Sesran : Wise... ;) Just interesting to know, what support tools you are using except email ?

Currently we have e-mail, Human Click, ICQ, AIM, and actual clients have a phone number to use. We have been toying with the idea of toll free support, but we have noticed that most of the phone support we get is something that would have been fixed or taken care of faster by e-mail.

Why does this sound like this has become an advertising forun thread?

Agreed, let's watch the, "3 days is too long, *we* only take..." -okie dokie pokey?

i think it's safe for me to reply here since i don't run a company :)

my hosts have so far replied to my support-form questions within a few hours (2-6 hours max i think) except for one exception where i actually prefaced my question with "this is not urgent, take your time to reply" and they took me at my word *grin* i've been with them for a little over 6 months now and they've been good with the replies.

i have to admit that i'm not always satisfied with the answers, like if i get replies like "it's a known bug, we're working on it" or "it can't be done". but at least i get answers, and since i'm being cheap and paying the minimum for my sites, i'm not going to expect the world on a platter :)

as an aside, i have a question for you webhosts - what do you think is a decent acceptable practice for telling your clients about hosting problems? specifically, i was thinking about the latest VDI outages - my hosts didn't put anything on their website (that i've been able to find anyway) or send out explanatory emails or anything. i had to call a billing phone number to try to get answers from a guy (who sounded really bored and tired and fed up, i can't blame him). Didn't get much in terms of answers either, it was basically "it's upstream of us, we can't do anything about it, we don't know when it'll be up again".

No sorry, no nothing. I could afford to shrug my shoulders about it because i'm doing this as a hobby and i don't have work-related sites hosted. Again, i don't blame them, it wasn't their fault, but still, i wouldn't have had to bug the poor guy if they'd mailed or put something up to explain or something?

Note that i am NOT giving the name of my hosts here, because i think they are good for the price i pay and i don't want it to appear like i am bad-mouthing them. But i am curious to know what other companies would do in this situation.

Sorry about the long post :)

I'm of the opinion that communication is the key. If my host had such a problem as VDI hosts did and made no mention of it either through email or on their site, I'd be really, really less than impressed with their focus on customers.

Just curious, but would WeinBar's signature constitute a full fledged advertisement in every post he makes? Cause if not, I would love to upgrade my signature.
Michael Weinstein - mweinstein@weinbar.com
Exec. Vice President 1-(866) WEINBAR | ICQ 68527503
WeinBar Communications Corporation, Scottsdale, AZ -http://www.weinbar.com
Dedicated Servers, Co-location, Alabanza and cpanel hosting from $49.99/year

Absolutely! You see, that is what is allowed.

Fell free to add any promotions to your sig (as long as you keep it 4 lines or less)

my host also has replied most of my support e-mail within 3 or 6 hours. 24 hours is becoming too long for me now :o

My current host has not answered my last 2 e-mails for support. They normally answer within 8 hours but the last 2 requests I had was ignored. Even if they had replied to tell me that my request cannot be done, that would have been fine.

So I've signed up with Tera-byte and am in the process of moving over to their server.

My feeling as a customer is that the host should always answer e-mails even if the customer's request cannot be done by them. Ignoring the paying customer is not good business... as we all know. :)

IMO when it comes to tech support the response should be with in minutes, certainly not more than an hour for the first reply (it does get busy at times in the data center). And I don't mean just an automated "Thanks, we'll get back to you" message.

For a sales type question or general inqury, I think the response should also be quick. IMO if you get a reply with in 24 hours that's acceptable.

I agree that way too many shopping sites dont' replay well to email inquiries, if you get a reply at all! I wish I had a dollar for everytime I emailed some major business or corp and never get any reply. Where do all the emails go? Why bother having an email contact address if they don't reply?