For those of you who work for a firm or who head a firm, what are your staffing levels like? Specifically do you have someone who manages your servers (assuming that you don't use a data centre elsewhere) and do they do anything else?

I think this question really varies depending on the size of the company

I would agree with Sean. In our company someone in a different division manages our server while sales/support are the same team.

We have separate teams for sales and support.

It depends on how large your business is and what is your sales volume.

Hi AbbieRose - good question. As we manage three different data centers and a mix of brand names, we have technicians assigned primary duties and have cross trained many of them. My office is in the Network Operations Center of our WestPort data center, and from here we monitor all three locations - in addition to having on-site staff at each. Our livechat is monitored by sales and level one and level two techs. As an example, with tens of thousands of domain names, we have one tech specifically assigned to manage those.

Each company should have it's stuff which can realize day to day activities.

Variety is the spice of life, So I hear...

From my experience with staffing small groups of people, utilizing everyone's skill sets in such a way that makes them happy with what they do is one of the most important things. Happy Staff makes Happy Customers.. If a staff member that is super awesome at one thing says that doing that one thing over and over is getting brain numbing and they'd rather do something else, work with them to see if there is something else they could do. As for the specific levels/departments that our company uses, we normally work with just sales/billing, support/admin , and abuse departments. Everyone works the departments they know and most learn the other departments eventually. It might sound like chaos, but a good balance of people who know what they are doing combined with a good manager to help direct things then things get done properly, on time, and everyone is happy.

Thank you Steve, this is kind of what I was thinking, or rather expecting would have been the case. Just lately our server guy is refusing to do certain things that are a part of his job description because he's been given a pay rise, and so kind of thinks he's been promoted. And he has, in that now he has people under him, but he still needs to get his own job done.

Office politics I guess, I never did like it....

Serve management is required no doubt about it.But you can have one organization who can take care of server management as well as support facilities for you(live chat/phone/email) or you can have multiple organizations.

This is the idea of outsourcing

every company has its own potential of growth and getting human resources for many companies in the start outsourcing is a good idea but once you are on the heap of moving forward and in the long run in house staffing is more beneficial.