Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Running a Web Hosting Business : Tech Support @ home

[AlaskanWolf]

We are looking for a few people that work out of home and would like to get on with Web Hosting Network.

We do all our tech support though our helpdesk, so we get about 1-10 tickets a day.

Looking for someone to work out of home, because of the amount of tickets we have, I cant really classify it as a full time or part time, just takes about 1-2 hours a day

What do you think is a good starting pay for this?

I can go for a hourly rate or just a flat fee, does anyone have some suggestions on this?

[syanet]

That's a qood question. How much would someone doing this limited amount of work need paid. I'll soon be in the same situation and just want to know.

[Paul_Szymanski]

Gary,

I would go for a per ticket rate as you really couldn;t judge how long a person was working on the ticket. On the other hand, if a ticket takes longer than expected the person obviously deserves to be paid more.

Maybe a per ticket rate and then can be adjusted if it is a long one.

[kunal]

How would you decide how much per ticket is worth and how many yuo have answered? I mean, like you said, some tickets might take longer, and some just a few seconds. So how does one decide what the rate should be?

I think the hourly rate is the best.

[AlaskanWolf]

good point, what would a good hourly rate be?

[kunal]

15$-20$ per hr?

[AlaskanWolf]

For only 10ish tickets a day??? (no way)

I am thinking more around $7 to $10 a hour

[cperciva]

Disclaimer: I have never held a regular job in my life and I'm not in the US so you'll probably want to ignore the following. Oh, and IANAL, not that it really matters here.

I think it rather depends what sort of "tickets" you'd be dealing with.

For standard handholding (eg, "if you want to make that cgi script executable, you should CHMOD 755 it") I'd say $10-$15 per hour would be reasonable.

For more serious issues (eg, "why do all my php scripts output #!/usr/local/bin/php when run through apache?") $15-$20 per hour would be reasonable.

For dealing with serious stuff (ie, real system administration tasks) anywhere from $30/hour upwards.

In the end, the question you need to ask is what sort of skills you need. If you can train someone to do the job in a week (which is the case for normal user handholding) then there is no reason to pay much above minimum wage; if they need to know a little (or a lot) about UNIX, expect to pay considerably more.

[biolight]

I think you should pay 10-20 for basic (reading the FAQ to the user), and more like 50-100 an hour for a real sysadmin.

Jeez, maybe it's just the bay area.

dog

[AlaskanWolf]

$7 to $10 is just fine..

[AlaskanWolf]

Just to let everyone know that's been inquiring about the open tech/customer service position, it has been filled.

Thanks WHT