Business Hours
Monday to Friday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. — these are our business hours, and have been for ages. Most people know that we have been providing support outside of these times for years, but so far this has been rather non-binding. We now want to change that — in fact, we have already changed it. After we were able to attract great new employees to our team in the last twelve months and reworked our internal processes in the current year, we were able to switch to a new shift system.
Support hours
Since 01.09.2023, our support team has been permanently staffed from Monday to Saturday from 9 a.m. to 0 a.m.!
This not only provides us with almost complete coverage of the times at which you create tickets, but also ensures a constant processing time, as hardly any tickets can build up during off-peak hours. This change represents a major milestone for our company and we are proud to have achieved it thanks to our strong team. September has shown that the new system works, which is why we are now officially communicating it.
Sunday
We also process your support tickets on Sundays, but we do not guarantee specific times for this. Usual inquiries received on Sundays are processed the same day. We may only process very complex technical inquiries, accounting questions or sales issues the following day. We treat public holidays as Sundays.
Telephone support and emergency hotline
We will maintain our previous telephone support hours so that PHP-Friends telephone support is available Monday to Friday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. This does not affect our emergency hotline, which was changed a year ago to differentiate it from normal telephone support. Until then, the hotline was in normal operation 24/7, which could no longer be displayed as we increasingly received uncritical calls at night.
However, it was important to us to continue to offer emergency support that can be reached free of charge at any time via the same fixed network number, and not (as is usual with some competitors) to set up a paid hotline whose costs are reimbursed if the provider is at fault, as according to our market monitoring, this has a strong deterrent effect. Ultimately, as a web hosting company, we want you to be able to report disruptions to our infrastructure to us without fear of any costs — even if the report turns out to be incorrect. Although our monitoring should always identify an actual fault before you do, no system is perfect.
That is why we make a corresponding announcement outside business hours, which asks for a ticket to be created in case of less critical concerns and then offers the option of being connected to our emergency support free of charge in the event of faults on our side.
On-call service
Our readiness remains available around the clock, 365 days a year and reacts autonomously to fault reports from our monitoring system. The response time is usually only a few seconds. Reports that have not been confirmed after five minutes due to readiness are automatically escalated to the fallback shift, which is planned parallel to the primary shift, so that this is also staffed 24/7 without interruption — just in case.