How many of you have staff?

[chatterbox]

I'm curious how many people are actually running their hosting business pretty much on their own and who hires support staff? I would think that it would be difficult to keep up with by yourself in such a customer support intensive business but I have heard of people doing it.

 

[romes]

I have 4 members on my staff. All our friends.

1 Handles the server, and keeps it running in top shape, and the other 3 handle the clients and their needs.

 

[shockym]

Are you talking about the exec team that owns the company, those who do all the work, some of the work or a little of the work? I have people spread all over, but its not that large a company.

 

[romes]

I think he means the total amount of people working for you.

 

[Lesli]

I've got support staff and folks who maintain the servers.

I don't have separate people for marketing. Since that's a weak point of mine, I'm going to take some classes, read up, and learn what works and what doesn't. I know that most of the "search engine submission" deals are of limited value, especially to someone whose domains have been active as long as mine have; some SEO tweaks might help, but I don't need to pay to have my domains submitted to 200+ search engines - many of them which wouldn't make much difference, even if my domains weren't probably already in there.

 

[AbbieRose]

You're right Lesli, many of the paid for services would simply have you joining the ranks of the millions who have gone before. You need the personal touch and that means learning about it-but its very worth it.

 

[whLuke]

We like to say that "we run a tight ship" with a lean team of of the industries most talented people.

Our company's Support department is pretty quiet these days due to lack of issues which is occurring. This is always good news

 

[LaneHost]

We have our own staff to help at varied of different things from assisting customers to installations, monitoring the servers, administration etc.

As with any business, you have to learn to give up some control as you get bigger and get good people working for you. This is probably one of the bigger steps in operating your own business, but something every business should plan for.

You will grow, and there will be a time when really there isn't enough time in the day anymore and will need to hire some staff to help.

 

[LT Smash]

If I do indeed purchase a reseller and make it my own, I plan to pretty much do everything myself. I don't think I will have too many customers, and might look into getting support emails sent directly to my phone in text message format. Hopefully it will be enough.

 

[handsonhosting]

We run a company with employees (6). Everyone works from home offices with remote access to servers. All are U.S. residents and are employees and not subcontractors. Also everyone has been with us multiple years (some 6+ years) except for one person who joined us about 4 months ago.

 

[rathost]

Right now we have 4 guys in support, 1 server administrator and 1 sales person(me)

 

[IkY0294]

I`ve got 4 staff members.
1. Server Manager
2. Live / Support Agent
3. Script Installer
4. Sales agent.

We been working for about 3weeks.

 

[nonparity]

we have staff...it would be impossable for just the owners to handle everything...even small handiling everything 247 will kill you

 

[SenseiSteve]

I actually don't know how many we have on staff between the various companies in River City Internet Group - I'm guessing 40+ at minimum.

 

[AH-Nick]

I work for AxisHost and I know we are fully staffed to provide support 24/7.

 

[HammerHost]

We have a total of 4 people (1 sales(myself), 1 design, 2 24x7 tech support/server admins)

 

[Zachary McClung]

There is four of us total, many contractors, and alot of chaos.

 

[romes]

The trend of this topics seems to be that the majority of hosts have 3-6 staff. Depending on how large your client base, this is a decent size.

Also, I wanted to see how many staff you think you should have? Anyone think the following figure it correct?


1 staff member = 100 clients
12 staff members = 1000 clients

Does that seem accurate? A former host buddy of mine told me that is how it should be.

 

[Zachary McClung]

The trend of this topics seems to be that the majority of hosts have 3-6 staff. Depending on how large your client base, this is a decent size.

Also, I wanted to see how many staff you think you should have? Anyone think the following figure it correct?


1 staff member = 100 clients
12 staff members = 1000 clients

Does that seem accurate? A former host buddy of mine told me that is how it should be.

From my consulting experience one system admin during normal situation should be able to handle 150 - 200 dedicated servers. The same system administrator should be able to handle 1,000+ shared clients. That does not factor in 24/7 support, etc. It depends on your business model too. If you have clients who are cheap in my experience they tend to abuse support.

Let's do the math on this ratio real quick. Lets say each staff member makes $30k per year. Which by industry standards is slow. To have 12 staff on board you would need to do $360,000.00/year in sales and that doesn't include hardware, space, power, bandwidth, taxes, etc.

Currently shared hosting accounts are selling for $5.00/month. If you had a 1,000 clients you would make $60,000.00/year. You would lose $300k each year. Now lets say you have 1,500 accounts per tech. You would then have $30k in expenses and $90k in revenue. This works out a little better.

In order to break even on the staff alone you would need to have 500 clients per 1 staff member based on the $5.00/month and $30,000.00 per year.

 

[romes]

Yeah, I told him that those figures seem kind of weird, but he insisted that is how it should be. Well, thanks for going into detail.