What is the preferred turn around time? I know if its not something urgent in our system you can set to low/med/high levels, but what is good? I have heard so many talk about waiting for days for any type of reply from their hosting company.

We try for anytime within the first 20 minutes of one being submitted to show good faith that we are investigating whichever issue might be going on, but I don't think I could handle waiting a day for a response.

Usually the ticket is reponded to and sorted within the first 30 mins.

Basically, if the issue is taken care of within minutes, the response can come any day.

But, as time passes, we expect more and more from hosts. I would probably be a bit disappointed if no answer would come within a few hours (that is if 24/7 support is being advertised).

Most hosts have ticket resolution SLAs published as 24 hours in order to underpromise and over deliver. As for the initial response, the faster the better to allow the client to know you are on it. Many hosts use an auto resonder to acknowledge the receipt of the ticket. Not personal but at least the client knows their ticket is in the system. Good luck.

I sat that the other day and on the phone with a friend of mine who hosts with DreamHost, she put in a ticket about 7am and nothing til almost 8pm that night. Her entire site was down, for the most part - its a business site thats run with forums so her index page shows (they rub VB for the boards), the calender worked and who's online - everything else was a table lost error.

Its really hard to help calm down someone when they are not hosting with you, its not like you have any idea what exactly is going on w/o being able to peek inside, but once everything did come back up it was a huge PITA since they lost 12+hrs of data doing a restore, good thing for backups. Seriously though if someone had me waiting 1/2 a day for a support ticket reply (even a "We are working on it") I could be happy with that, but nothing for 12+ hrs I would FREAK OUT.