At what stage should you hire extra support reps for your company?
As many people know most companies start out with just the owner providing support to a few clients but as the company grows and acquires more clients, its obvious more people will be needed to help handle the support requests.
When do you think should a host hire extra support?
How many customers/sites should there be to support reps in your opinion?

matters what kind of clients you have... if you have 5 dollar a month "20 support tickets" kinda customers, you will need help... If your client's do not require that much support then you do not need the help.... My partner and I hired 1 person after we got about 300 clients...

When you get to many clients to handle yourself.

Yes I would have to agree, if you are doing fine with support and it is only you, as long as it is not putting exessive strain on you or keeping you from doing things, if you can keep it under control, you don't NEED to waste money hiring anyone else, but might be a good option to consider getting someone to help.

It really depends on how you would like to project your hosting company to your clients. Although I am just new into this business I did a lot of research about the hosting industry and I also invested in an in house technical support team. It is a small team consisting of 6 members in total working in pairs on 8 hour shifts but I think it serves the purpose for me because I would want to offer 24/7 live chat technical support. Therefore it really depends on what YOU want yo do with your company.

Well yes, it would also be a matter of personal preference as well.. each company and individual would have something different about it.

If you are the only one providing support you also have to consider if your customers are all in the same timezone as yourself, if they arent then it may be a good idea to hire someone that is in the same timezone as some of your customers so you can provide support to them when they need it.

Yeah.. what I was thinking, I live in Atlantic Canada Time.. So what I was thinking is possibly getting someone in California as they are Pacific, and would have about 5 hours difference? (I think)

Well if you are the only one providing support to your clients then the best thing to do would be outsourcing your support so in the long run it will help you out.

For my Shell company, there is myself and Matthew which is in Maryland, and for my web company there is myself and Gokcehan in Ontario.

cool...even though I dont know them...as long as it works for you

One you go alot client maybe like 700 up then maybe you hire more support.

I got only 3 guy support one EST, CST, PST

Well that would work out too...like having a person from Australia do tech support for you and so on because of the time difference but then soon when you grow you would either have a fully fledged office for your technical support or maybe just outsource it.

That is a very good idea to have someone there to help, that way your usually covered 24/7.

Yes and not only that but it would be very economical