Here are some eye-opening support statistics:
- About 25% of our members have ever interacted with our support system.
- About 14% of our members have opened more than one support issue.
- Over 50% of our support issues come from under 5% of our members.
- Providing support is our single largest recurring monthly cost line item. That means it costs us more than we pay for bandwidth.
- The cost of providing support is growing at a faster rate than any other cost.
In other words, 75-95% of our members are paying to subsidize the support requirements of a small minority. Although that raises some serious issues about fairness, it isn’t really unusual; most hosting companies operate exactly that way: they build a certain amount into their monthly fee to each user to subsidize the cost of providing support to the small portion of their userbase that requires it.
However, as you know, we don’t have a monthly fee. That means the support subsidy has to come from somewhere else. At NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, it’s currently coming out of the R&D budget. So while our entire member base may not be paying a fee for support they may or may not use, you most definitely are paying for it in terms of reduced functionality and delays in rolling out the new features and services you want.
This is particularly frustrating since we’ve always presented ourselves as a no-frills, do-it-yourself host with limited support that does a lot of R&D that you simply don’t get anywhere else.
Obviously, we need to make a change to get back to our core values.
Effective immediately, we are changing our standard support hours and implementing an optional “Extended Support” plan.
Our new support hours for standard issues are:
- Monday through Friday, 10am – 6pm
- Saturday and Sunday, 12pm – 4pm, Pacific Time
With Extended Support, hours for standard issues are:
- Monday – Friday, 8am – 8pm
- Saturday – Sunday: 11am – 5pm, Pacific Time
Standard issues are those typical questions we receive that don’t pertain to downtime or other serious problems with the service. We’ll be continuing to do our best to address emergency issues as quickly as possible, regardless of our stated hours.
Wider hours are not the only benefit to Extended Support:
- Members with extended support will have their standard issues prioritized over other standard issues.
- To ensure timely and fair support to all members, we may occasionally delay response to standard issues raised by those members who submit an above-average number of standard issues. Members with extended support who submit an above-average number of standard issues will encounter shorter delays than they otherwise might.
The cost for Extended Support is $1.00 per month. Unlike most of our services, it’s purchased one month at a time and billed in advance. Once activated, it can be set not to renew at any time without affecting any time remaining in the current billing period. Since for most moderate users, the bulk of their support issues arise in the first month while they are getting set up, they can add Extended Support if they wish, and then remove it once things are humming along smoothly.
The revenues we generate from Extended Support will go directly to pay the people who provide support. Once we have enough Extended Support members to cover the costs of the current extended hours, we’ll start widening the extended hours. Should we reach 24×7 extended coverage, we can evaluate widening the scope of the support we provide.
I want to emphasize that Extended Support is optional. If you don’t use our support, this doesn’t affect you at all, and no one is required to sign up for it. If you value our support, and you want to show it, this is an excellent way to do so.
This is definitely a sort of social experiment, to see if the people who interact with our support system find enough value in that system to cover the associated costs. If it is successful, we will be able to extend and improve that system in a way that would otherwise be impossible. If not, we will have to evaluate our support offerings and look for ways to constrain it to a manageable cost.