pay per ticket ?

[RapidCityHosting]

If you're a host charging your customers. You will fail.

 

If you're a outsourcing company, and just charge on a per help basis. This is a good idea.

[keliix06]

It's apparent that many posting in this thread have very little business sense outside of the mass overselling market. Business users pay for quality and are more than willing to pay for support, depending on the issue.

 

Claiming a business will fail because they don't have your narrow vision of what hosting is (or even if they are hosting at all) is quite naive.

 

How on earth is it any different to create an invoice for support, than to have the helpdesk create it directly? It's not at all.

[SilverNodashi]

It's apparent that many posting in this thread have very little business sense outside of the mass overselling market. Business users pay for quality and are more than willing to pay for support, depending on the issue.

 

Claiming a business will fail because they don't have your narrow vision of what hosting is (or even if they are hosting at all) is quite naive.

 

How on earth is it any different to create an invoice for support, than to have the helpdesk create it directly? It's not at all.

 

My point exactly. If I don't pay my support staff, then I can't offer decent support and my company will fail. It's strange how that works, isn't it? But, you'll see how this all fits together when your hosting company grows to such a point where you need to start paying salaries for staff,just to tell a user how to setup his email account or install an FTP client onto his PC.

[RapidCityHosting]

The last 2 posts are idiotic and not well planned out.

 

Running a web hosting business goes into all aspects.

 

Think of when you buy a car. They dont say "Your regular warranty will be an additional $9500".

 

They pay for hosting. That hosting pays for your servers and your staff. You cant sell someone a shared hosting account, where they have no possible way of fixing the solution themselves and say "If you have any problems, it'll be $x for each support ticket"

 

I could somewhat understand for dedicated/vps as this is why "Managed Servers" tend to be a bit more, as Unmanaged are cheaper.

 

But for Reseller Accounts, Shared Hosting this is not the greatest idea to make some money. You have to realize that if they have a issue. They go somewhere else. Have their files copied over. They are done with you.

[SilverNodashi]

I STRONGLY suggest you take that back! Some, well a lot of companies on this forum have been in business for years, and have many many servers and thousands of clients.

 

Here's a scenario: Let's say you have a client, who doesn't know much about computers, the internet, email or websites. Yet, she has a fairly big business selling a lot of cosmetic products. Now, she wants to start selling online. Who does she contact? You. Now, she needs help with just about everything there on the internet, and she phones / emails in every day and your staff end up semi-training her, cause she doesn't know how to add an email account to her computer's outlook. Will a $5/m account really cover that tech's time (let's say it's an hour to 2 hours per day)? Think about this carefuly when you say it's idiotic and our business will fail. Some support doesn't need to cost the end user, especially on the shared hosting site. But, if my resellers or VPS clients expect me to offer level1,2 & 3 end support to their clients, then I will charge them. If they can't handle the workload, or afford a support engineer(s), then it's only fair to expect me to charge for that kind of support.

 

So, please rethink your statement about this kind of feature to be redundant, and any company who charged for support (your attack was to all kinds of support) is stupid. You clearly haven't been there yet, and you're either not paying your staff or you have a few million shared hosting clients who are over paying for their hosting so that you can pay for staff. Did you know, that for every technician that you hire, you need a PC, a phone, a chair, desk, stationary, etc? This also cost money, well in my country at least.

 

P.S. The last time I brought a car, I had to pay extra for the warrantee! Some car dealers will work the warantee into the car's price and you think you get it for free, and sometimes you're even lucky enough to get it for free as some sort of promotion.

[bogo]

@ SoftDux

Well said and completely on focus. More over, one of the biggest issues for a hosting company which provides real quality support, are those countless low level companies giving away everything for FREE and claim to be the cheapest hosting company on this planet. Sooner or later they go out of business ...and they should!

[atilla.gahbro]

this is an interesting topic. i can see all of the different opinions on this subject. its almost like religion and politics...

 

what i think is evident is that everyone uses whmcs in different ways. yes the majority are straight hosting providers and many of the comments are coming from that angle.

 

in our case we dont even charge for hosting. we are not even a "hosting company" but rather an integrated services company providing t1/t3 (the slow brother of the e variant for you overseas dudes) access with voip and many other bundled services.

 

why do we use whmcs?

 

because it is the one product we have found that can integrate with other apps using modules and also has an internal kb, ticketing, orders, etcetera, etcetera...

 

in our business model issues can go from the public ip entry point in to the customers local network real quickly. unless the customer is on a support plan (which we intend on using the licensing module to bill for) we charge for every minute of support and do so at a high rate just to cover our costs for providing the service. if we did not we would be breaking even at the end of the month.

 

even with that model we still miss support tickets that should have been billed for because in our current system there is nothing but the human element to catch those tickets. no application level checks to catch such tickets.

 

our msa and tos state that any issues we are asked to work on are billable if the source of the problem that we "resolve" is on the customer owned systems. so we do not need a preauth to generate an invoice after the support ticket is closed.

 

i read in one of the earlier posts where someone suggested that a provider who charges for support will not be in business very long. the exact opposite is true. in a culture of free everything mentality only the googles of the world with indirect revenue streams can partake of such unorthodox practices.

 

i'll say it now and hopefully matt reads this. if whmcs creates a module to flag tickets as "billable" at the first reply from an admin, then we will but that module.

 

sold.

 

we'll even pay in advance.

 

by the way comments are not worth $5.00 or even $3.00 but they are amusing.

 

on the other hand great support for operation effecting issues is worth something to customers.

 

and needs to be billed for... in our model at least.

[chickendippers]

If a customer were to require such high levels of help (and we've come close to charging them in the past) then I think the new quotation system would be a great way to handle it.

[atilla.gahbro]

the quotation system is great for a one off incident or a sale of some systems but for routine support that does not need to be pre authed or where the exact amount is unknown it does not really represent the operational flow of that incident.

 

support outside of situations included in a hosting package quite often starts as a support ticket but then gets to a point where its something in between a quote, an order and an invoice. its this middle ground that is not covered by whmcs currently.

 

i noticed in the quote system in 3.8 we can set the quote as accepted and generate an invoice. all we would need is the ability to give an admin the ability to check a box for a support ticket to flag it as billable and when the invoice is generated referencing that ticket the ticket would get closed out. that wo-uld be the app level check to insure that it gets billed. if its flagged as billable an invoice is what it would take to close the ticket.

 

i know i am partially oversimplifying it but whmcs already has a similar logic in the quoting system.

 

i personally know of many companies that are both hosts and managed service providers that always complain of this problem. as a secondary problem when you use an ternal billing system there never seems to be enough detail of the work performed for the person who is getting the bill. then if you copy and paste ticket notes in to the invoice you run the risk of sometimes pasting internal notes that may not have been for the customer's eyes...

[zigzam]

Charging for support would make clients search the knowledge base or google instead of asking well documented questions. Some times support can be too easy to get and clients will take advantage of it.

[RapidCityHosting]

Although I can understand your point of view.

 

Its very flawed. People in todays world would be more than willing to find another host that is cheaper, more reliable, and does not charge for support.

 

Face it, none of us on this website (well..most of us) who own hosting companies can not compete with the likes of JaguarPC, HostGator, 1&1, GoDaddy, etc. Between me and the wife, we bring in about $120,000 a year. Then you take out the house payment, motorcycle payment, car payment (x2), utilities, etc. It leaves some money, but not enough to dump into advertising as i would like.

 

I spend approximately $500 a month or so in advertising. Sometimes I break even, other times I make more, and others I make less than what I spend in advertising.

 

Which is where im getting at. I doubt the OP who wants to charge per ticket has the client base, and regular signups that would merit the competition with the bigger companies that I stated before. You would almost have to offer double what they do, at half the price to get people to even think about hosting with you.

 

And this would cause for multiple things that could go wrong and cause your companies name to go down in flames.

 

Example, If the OP was 15. Has a reseller account, and WHMCS. Now he has a "company".

 

He sees a cool case fan that glows in 20 million different colors! but is $30 short of what he would have to pay!

 

he charges $1.50 per ticket.

 

He goes into 15 of his customers accounts and changes something. Which forces them to pay. He fixes it instantly (since he was the one that broke it). Now you have a pissed off customer, and a 15 year old boy laughing because he just "WTF PWNED J00!".

 

Obviously this is not likely, but now you have to consider the AVERAGE mentality of a 15 year old boy with any sort of "power". They tend to abuse it.

 

Example: Ever been on a IRC server where a IRCOP was 15? He banned people for idiotic reasons, and used reasons of: "Owned".

 

Example: Ever played on a private game server such as wow where the admin was 15? Same gig.

 

Now, considering those were non profitable, and a web hosting company is profitable. They realize they can get a bit more out of it than a simple laugh.

 

 

So, you all might wonder "Well thats if he was 15...but im (insert number over the age of 21 here)!"

 

Servers tend to do funny things at times, which when you fix 1 persons account, it sometimes screws another's account up.

 

When you update software such as mysql, apache, cpanel, etc. It tends to make programs stop working.

 

This would cause for people to..you guessed it. submit a ticket (pay).... but it was not their fault, and they dont even have the access to fix it, if they wanted too.

 

I could understand if you were doing this for dedicated, and as outsourcing support customers. As they would have total control over it to fix something.

 

Can you imagine a shared client having to pay $X to fix the A Names in the DNS?...he literally doesnt have the access to do so..so he is FORCED to pay.

 

Understand?

 

(And no..you must of paid for the extended warranty ...unless you bought used)

[keliix06]

Again, people are being very short-sighted. WHMCS isn't only used for hosting. No one has been necessarily advocating charging for every ticket, but the ability to would be a nice feature. All of the hosts mentioned in the last post again fall into the mass-overselling market, not the business quality market.

 

In the real world business customers often pay for support issues that are not caused by the supplier. In the hosting world, that would be things like "can you help me troubleshoot why my site isn't showing up corectly?", "can you tell me how to use ftp?", etc.

 

I don't use DirectAdmin (and would likely not use this addon as we already have a method of charging for certain types of tickets in place that I would imagine brings in as much revenue as some posting in this thread make overall, so you might want to rethink this stance) but I certainly understand that some do and think it should be includedin WHMCS. Same with this request.

 

Before anyone gets the wrong idea and starts thinking we charge for normal questions, that's not the case at all. We answer any questions you can think of, including extended support for Joomla, Mambo, MiaCMS, WordPress and SMF. We do charge if you want us to do work on your site, because at that point we are no longer a host, we're acting as a webmaster.

[michiganmedia]

My vote is to have a pay per ticket system. I own a company that provides hosting and support services for a CMS called Joomla. We handle all support request for hosting a zero cost. But when they want to have a CMS question answered they need to take a ticket at the help desk and pay for this support.

 

We will do things like change a style sheet, keep the CMS up to date for them, move a site from dev to production, and even help them fix a software install.

 

My customers love the idea of having a help desk for "Extra" services your hosting company can provide as Professional services to your hosting services.

 

I see this as plain and simple suggestion to the developer of this software. ***HINT HINT developer**** I dont see it as something we should criticize others about. Support is support and if you can make a living off from charging for it. Your the smarter guy and I applaud you. I actually applaud myself because im proud to charge for additional services on a pay per ticket bases. My customers love it and Im lucky to earn the cash. I think its a even exchange.

[cmcp]

Not everyone uses WHMCS for hosting support.

 

There are a lot of professions who bill by the hour / by the ticket.

 

Web design and accounting are two I know are in use.

[panacheweb]

I do not see this as needing to be programmed into the software.

 

I charge a flat 25 bucks a month to clients for software updates and maintenance. this only includes updating software that is out of date. It does not include anything else. It only is for a max of 2 hours of time a month. This does not include any updates to content on their site, or anything else.

 

I think getting a client on a monthly support contract is the better way to go, instead of a per ticket basis. Reason is some months you may not have to do anything, and other months may be a nightmare, so it evens out in the end.

[ChrisGooding]

Exactly the same here for our unmanaged products. We have simply created an addon for the products in question, which gives them 'extended support' which is outside what we would normally cover.

 

This is charged monthly, but should a client need a 1 off, or need a big job doing, we simply create a product by itself as a one off for them (although with invoices function, that will no longer need to happen).

 

Even though we do charge for outside the normal support stuff, which tbh is usually only ever the colo customers who need it, I could never bring myself to charge people at the opening a ticket stage!!

 

Ludicrous

[AndrewMKP]

Can I just add to this and state that different business needs dictate.

 

If you are in a market where you believe this to be viable then you are within your rights to concur, if you are in a market where you don't believe this to be viable, sure have your comment but don't stop the expansion and slate other companies and peoples business ethics here yeah? I ask again in about the 3rd thread now for some sort of dacorum on this forum.

 

You must understand you cannot slate your competators and think its all dandy and fine. You have your business rules, they have theirs. Just agree to disagree, we are not here to discuss the politics of this industry nor are we here to discuss personal outgoings.

 

Now where I stand in regards to this is split.

 

I would like the option for this to be available and convert it into an invoice potentially.

 

Reason being is we deal with clients accross the globe who need ammendments, assistance or troubleshooting in regards to web design. They need our coders to assist and change this for them. The option to simply add a charge for this would be very helpful rather than bringing up an invoice however this is a viable option granted.

 

I would like to see the option of this, please remember I think an optional approach would be the best one, to be able to have this on or off.

 

This way business' are able to have this on if they need to charge, if you disagree with it then you don't need to enable it do you There are many other services people offer with the WHMCS system other than just web hosting support. Perhaps consider thinking out of the box and understanding that there are OTHER business' in this world and on this forum that do not do webhosting at all.

 

Business needs dictate.

[atilla.gahbro]

we recently started flagging tickets to a user called "need-to-bill" and keeping track of billable support incidents that way. its not the greatest but it works for now.