Since I am a total newb to Discourse and Ruby I need a managed setup. I am currently with Communiteq (formerly DiscourseHosting), and even though I am pretty happy with them, I am starting to worry that they’re not staffed well enough to handle problems 24/7. I also acknowledge that I am pretty spoiled when it comes to support response times, as I host websites with KnownHost and they handle everything in 30 min, no matter what time of the day/year I write them. My question is, how are the response times for Discourse.org hosting support tickets? I am not talking initial response, I am talking an actual human reviewing your case.
Communiteq (formerly DiscourseHosting) is not affiliated with discourse.org and therefore you question would probably be better served at Contact Us - Communiteq
cc @RGJ
Now if you have questions about https://payments.discourse.org/pricing, well, that can be answered here.
I guess he already aware of that. While @WorldIsMine is currently hosting with Communiteq (formerly DiscourseHosting) now he is enquiring about discourse.org hosting’s initial response time.
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This. Thank you for clarifying 
Oh, I completely misread your post then. My apologies.
I’m not sure what the SLA is for discourse.org, but being involved with Sitepoint which is hosted by discourse.org, I can say, that all issues encountered to date were resolved quickly. They also went above and beyond many times through support channels here on Meta.
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The problem here is that “quickly” is a pretty subjective thing. It only means that your expectations are being exceeded. I think @WorldIsMine is looking for a more objective SLA.
To make this a bit more specific, this is about a 5 hour response time for a priority 2 issue (forum up but PM’s not working) on a Sunday night. We guarantee an upper limit of 12 hours response time on issues like this. That is a maximum and 90% of our tickets are handled way, way faster.
I think we’re doing pretty ok there but it would be nice to have an objective and quantitative comparison here.
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I get that, which is why I prefaced with, I do not know what their SLA is (wasn’t privy to that info). I can only state that when we ran into a problem, and I was the one to report it, we had responses back within an hour and usually had the issue corrected soon after or within 12 hours (if it was minor). All major incidents (think downtime) were resulted within a couple of hours depending on the complexity of the problem, but they were actively working on it.
Only the Discourse Team can comment on their SLA agreement. I’m sure they’d be more willing to discuss that if an email was shot off to team@discourse.org though.
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I’d prefer to hear from someone on the outside. I find reviews more trustworthy than asking the source. For example, just terminated my service with LiquidWeb. Their staff said they’re the best, and their team (known as heroic support) gets everything resolved quickly. Well, for me, that wasn’t the case. At times, I’ve waited for 2 days for a ticket response.
The 5-hour response was the last ticket I frantically kept updating. But I notified you guys of this problem a solid couple of hours before that (emails not going out). So, this issue we well reported well over 20 hours ago (according to my timestamps). But it’s OK, didn’t realize you guys had a 12 - hour policy, my fault for not checking that. Actually, where would I check that? Is this something hosting companies provide in their TOS? I’ve been skiming through the TOS or the FAQ and didn’t find anything.
By the way, the issue was resolved and things running smoothly now.
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We’ve been running our site www.helloforos.com on Discourse.org for a year and a half. Amazing uptime, fast response to any issues, and they take care of upgrades and plugin installations. Would definitely recommend the service! Response time for support tickets of course depends on the request, but can’t really think of many emergencies that would need faster than a few hours turn around. I can just say their response time exceeds my expectations for a team that is also focused on improving the platform.
Update: when we had some problems with emails getting delivered, they were quick to resolve this, and they have taken over the sending of all email alerts.
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