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Acceptable turnaround times for support tickets for LET providers - opinions?
Hi all -- I'm curious about your personal general opinions for acceptable turnaround times for support tickets for your favorite providers?
Now to be completely fair, some tickets are more complex or difficult to resolve, so please keep that in mind with your response.
Perhaps break things down by initial support response, and then please include some context of the complexity of the ticket.
For example, server downtime response would be different than a sales or billing question response which might be different than a more technical/configuration issue response, etc.
I appreciate your thoughts on all this! 
And BTW, the purpose of this thread is NOT to call out specific providers or complain about a specific terrible experience. We all know that if we get into too much detail, we'll cause this thread to get derailed mighty fast, so may I suggest you please keep specific cases in a separate thread, as usual in this forum! Again, this thread will hopefully be focused on a more general view of the issue! 
Comments
24-48 hours.
Depends on the provider and the type of ticket.
My experience is on average 24 hours to 14 days. Some respond more quickly, some respond slower.
There are providers even don't have ticket system.
It all depends on the price you pay and how cheap it is.
But say 24 - 72 hours is acceptable.
On the other hand, if the problem is critical and the complete node is down. Let's say 24 hours to communicate about the root cause.
72 hours max but what makes it feel worse when the provider responding to comments on LET and ignore reaponding to clients issue.
Depends. If you pay $5/month or more, 24 to 48 hours.
If you pay less than that 0 expectations and 0 support. Will probably be charged for opening a ticket.
I'm a firm believer that if you are in the LOW end buying hosting you shall... you MUST know what you are doing at a pro level so that you don´t need support.
How is anything more than 12 hours acceptable unless it requires some manual work.
I have good news: My experience with I guess 20+ providers here on LET is that about 90% of them react within minutes to a few hours, the average being about 1 hour.
I'm fine with that, especially in the LE market segment.
Note: What I wrote is based almost exclusively on tech support (usually early on right after buying, things like "I need an ISO mounted, please"). My sales/pre-sales ticket experience is very limited as I almost never have that need. If I find that some info is missing I ask right here on LET so as to have the response available to everyone.
Tech support
Working day Mon-Fri - within 4hrs of submitting a ticket
Weekends 6hrs.
Sales
Working day Mon-Fri - within 6hrs
Not sure why people think it's acceptable for 24hrs but I wouldn't be happy with that and I would be immediately looking for another provider.
No matter the cost or what they have charged for a client its a service industry and therefore its expected.
If that is not what you wish to do as a service provider you are either stating it in big bold letters upon signing up so clients understand and know they are on their own or in the wrong industry.
I have this opinion that my expectation of the time to first reply must be proportionate to the amount of money that I pay for the service.
10$ for yearly service -> up to two weeks (even a month)
50$ for monthly service -> 72 hours
300$ for monthly service -> under an hour
If something is critical (server down, unreachable etc) I would hope for some help within 3-4 hours, otherwise 1-2 days. If we are talking about cheap providers.
i better get a response for my 1$ month vps that i run my billion dollar business on within few minutes otherwise am making a LET post to talk about it.
Something like that, because I don't see server/network outage as issue on clients side and it's only normal to give some response as soon as possible insted of keeping client in the dark for day or two even if there's not a lot of money involved.
This has nothing to do with slow support and there's no excuse for ignoring clients for days when issue is at hosts side.
If the issue is critical, like when the entire node is down, being resolved within 12 to 24 hours for a standard host, or within 24 to 48 hours for a Low-End Host is acceptable.
If it's something that's not critical and is your personal issue, like accidentally disabling SSH on your server, it really depends on what you pay for. If you pay less than a few bucks per month for a service, expect the response time to be around 1~2 weeks. If you pay like 50$ or more, the service provider should at least make an effort to help you resolve the issue within 2 to 3 days, excluding weekends.
It depends on the price you are paying, the thing that you need. Are you looking for time to resolve the issue or first reply?
I'm going to base this on the first reply.
Let's start with sales. In general, Within weekdays when you are looking to spend 100$<, the response time should be within four hours. If less, then I'd expect 24 hours.
Billing. This is the hard one. I'd say 100$< equates to up to 24 hrs >100$ up to 48 hrs.
Tech support 100$< 1 hr within weekdays, 4 hrs within weekends, and >100 $ within 12 hrs on weekdays and weekends within 24 hrs.
It also depends on what kind of host you are using. Some small hosts will have elevated waiting times, but you usually get a better deal with a more personalized service that fits your needs better. Bigger ones typically have a whole team of people working on each thing while at the same time offering less flexibility as their systems are built to XYZ spec and XYZ capacity, and that is what they are offering.
Don't assume the support/engineering staff is the same as the sales/marketing/PR folks.
~ SMARTHOST
For prem providers/prices, divide the hours by 2.
To be noted, I rarely contact support. If a service goes down, I assume (and hope) they know about it, but I was wrong about that more than once. I usually open a ticket after at least one hour of downtime and if there's no email/status/announcement mentioning the issue.
This. So many are used to LET providers being side gigs, so they are thinking one man show. Which some are, and that's great. But I'm sitting here messaging right now waiting for my kids to finish brushing their teeth so I can put them to bed, I'm not on call at the dc tonight someone else is sooooo you have an emergency it won't be me answering 😂
(Won't be me next week either, so no one go getting peeved if you don't see my name on a ticket this week! I'll be on a beach in Guatemala enjoying my much needed vacation 🤣)
I think the whole thing is, the freedom to make contracts is the freedom to make good or bad contracts. Read TOS before signing up, if response time is not something you like, don't sign up with that provider. Some providers have different times for different things.
If it's not within a few minutes I'll write an angry thread on LET and get a reply immediately
I personally feel the support intial response should be within few minutes to upto 1 hour (As some times the ticket might be submitted by client at the time of shift change or may be if there is some outage and if there is a rush of tickets it can take longer)
Then if it's related to sales or billing it should be still answered within 24 hours at the most and L3 tickets within 12 hours usually or at the most 24 hours, unless it's something outside the control of the provider
But still proper explanation should be provided if it can't be solved within above time frame.
15 - 45 minutes billing questions during work hours. Up to 3 hours for technical questions 24/7 if "super" support mumbo jumbo declared on website.
Realistic expectations: very good knowledge base or forum.
I would prefer it on the contrary - technical inquiries are generally much more important
Ownership and resolution are usually (or sometimes) measured separately.
Putting billing-related matters aside, for general support with providers around here, I have a reasonable expectation for ownership of tickets, and I'm "ok" with it being within 12, or most 24 hours.
With regards to resolution time, they may and will vary, depending on issue(s).
If they're infrastructure-related issues, I don't expect them to be resolved within a few hours, or even overnight, since providers are customers too, just like us, and are sometimes waiting for updates and/or intervention from their provider(s).
What I have from the "LE" world are just for personal/hobby stuff.
My work-related servers are hosted elsewhere, where they're covered 24/7 and I don't have to worry about lengthy downtime or getting no response from support because there are processes in place where if things do go down, they should be up and running ASAP, or else lots of phones will start ringing, including mine
Some providers clearly states in their offers that support is at best effort and can take days or even weeks. If that's the case it's fine by me, otherwise I would not accept the offer.
If nothing else is stated I'm fine with ~48 hours during business days. I cant really wrap my head around paying a few dollars a month and expecting premium service, that is just not possible.
Self managed services have no technical issues which should be reported by the user. And network wide problem or hardware is solved without notification.
Generally yes, but when there is any hiccup not detected by monitoring, it should be reported. For example it may be false-positive AntiDDoS ban.
5 seconds.
Generally based on the Type of service and issue , if its general support 24-48 ,
if its a outage within 4 (if its provider outage IE not a mis config by client)
billing 48 Hours +
Live chat is always a nice touch for providers "we offer it"
if its a Dedicated would expect under 6 hours
We actually offer phone support during office hours, you just gotta provide a support pin from the billing panel 🤷♂️ that beats ticket time 😆
In spite of having a ticket system through WHMCS I still get a lot of help requests over discord, if there was a way of having a smooth enough help system that it could rival discord I'd be very interested in the feature set criteria.