24-7 support or no

i am about to try and getting into small webhosting (primarly doing free-5$ webhosting plans) as well as voip and virtual game server hosting.

i've heard to things about needed support to run a business. one is you NEED 24/7 support becasue that is the standard in the industry. which makes sense, exspcialy for large companies who need poeple answering support tickets all the time (so customers can get responses back in a timely manner)

i've also heard if your support only runs on certain hours a day ie 9am-5pm that that is sufficent. which i kind of agree with this for smaller businesses where you arent generating enough money to hire full time support and also your need for support is less becasue you have less customers

for me i think i have to fall under the certain hours a day of operating. the thing is i have strange hours to do this, 4pm-11pm weekdays, and 12pm-2am weekends. which is about the same hours more or less as any other company would have who doesnt have 24-7 support. but i would just like some input on some expierenced small business owners. is having the uniform 9am-5pm support critical, is everything usually more busy at these times? (etc) i can probally adjust a few things spew a few dollars and turn a couple legs but i just can't decide if it would be worth it expescialy with a business in which i will have less than 10-15 customers total

I would offer the limited support as a standard, and for an additional cost offer 24/7.

I think you'll be fine, but you also have to look at your target customers and see where they are. You want to offer decent hours within THEIR time zone, not necessarily your own. If you have customers in the UK, you wouldn't want to offer 4pm-11pm EST support because that would be 9pm to 4am there.

You also have to look at what kind of services you offer. For your services, which are smaller than the average webhosting services, later hours may be okay. If you offered enterprise services, then you'd probably want to be around 9-5, as your customers may be running THEIR business 9-5 on your services... so when they need help, they'd expect you to be around.

Also, if you are going to use a trouble-ticket system, 24/7 support may mean, to your customers, that THEY can contact you 24/7, which they can via the web. You may wish to say "We offer a ticket submission help desk that is available 24/7". Then when they submit a ticket, just have an autoresponse that says something along the lines of "we received your ticket, it may take 12-24 hours for a reply".

After you get 10,000-25,000 tickets, run a report that shows when the majority of the tickets are being sent. If 90% of your tickets are coming between noon and 3pm, maybe you can start offering phone support during those hours for a little extra.

Best of luck.

thanks, for the replies. i think i should be good because my servers are located in the US. my target audience is about 21 and under (my business is video game based providing game server hosting, voip hosting, and web hosting as just an extra thing you can get out of it all)

You can take outsourcing support choosing the lowest plan as per your need, you can shift to higher plan gradually as you grow with your client base.