How many are on your team? I know some start up small companies have limited tech workers and even others just rely on one or two people, maybe three at the most. Is your company like that?

The number of personal really depends on the work you have and also the support you offer. If you provide 24/7 support with 15 minutes response , you will need at least 4 support guys. If your response is 24 hours , you can hire 2 at least.

If you're starting up, you can also outsource. Well, you can do that even if you're not starting up...

Also remember that you'll probably want at least one level-2 type technician who can take care of advanced issues behind the scenes without customer contact. Your first level techs can bring issues to this level-2 tech to take care of. This not only leaves your level-1 techs free to tackle the next issue but also gives them a track for promotion/professional growth.

Alot of places do indeed seem to work with limited staff. Outsourcing is rather a scary prospect I'd think. Unless you can find trustworhy comapanies to outsource to with high standards and affordable pricing it doesn't seem worth the risk.

I don't outsource my tech support as it seems a little iffy like purple was noting on. We do have a good bit of variety though and yes we always try within 15 minutes on the clock to reply with any type of update and clients really appreciate it. Some of us also have a kind of pool of money that when we are late on a reply, we gotta cough up some dough (kind of like when your a kid in a household and have the cookie jar so when you swear you gotta fork over a quarter.......ours are dollar bills though).

I've seen many companies that turned for starting 5 people to at least 30+ now. I say if you are going to start or have a company like that, it will grow, just depends on how you market or run it at least.

Part of starting out small and growing is finding right people. I know a couple in the area while not web hosting directly are still small mom/pop run computer shops and they always hit up local colleges for geeks that are looking for their first job.

In my opinion, not many people are needed for the support team if it is a group of real professionals.

That depends on what the specialties of those professionals are

Those who work for the support team should highly qualified specialists, otherwise they won't be able to provide a customer with a correct solution of the problem.

So how many is a good number and should the staff be spilt or should everyone know everything? What about the levels of support that many are used to dealing only with level 1 techs, then the ticket escalates?

Such companies as HostingZoom have different levels of support and the ticket get escalated in case the support tech of the 1st level thinks that the issue needs further investigation by the 2nd level support.

It depends on the type of system you'd like to employ, we do incorporate a level system howevver the higher levels still do answer tickets if they have "nothing" to do.

Yes, this can work often. I am not sure about what level of education I would be happy with but certainly there are a good number of adults working their way through a degree who need to support themselves and are proficient enough to help. You would just want to be sure that they had flexible enough time to fit your needs.