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Is it standard nowadays to charge customers for support? Checking out the pricing (and correct me if I'm wrong), does it really cost $5000/month to have 24/7 support? That seems crazy to me.

Now granted I pay about $300/month for the VM I have with my hosting provider, but I can pick up a phone at any hour and talk to a tech when things go south.

I really don't care how good a service is, I want to talk with a breathing human being when my business is down.

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(We've been customers for well over a year, close to 18 months I think)

You do get support for no additional fee, but you can pay for additional access to support staff. That said, they've always been quite responsive to our requests, with a fairly short turnover time by email.

It is however customary in the industry to pay for additional levels of support:

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/ https://www.heroku.com/critical

> $300/month for the VM

High-availability, automatic failover, managed, with diamond-cut SSDs I hope? Who are you with? For that money you should just pick up a box.

When a typical developer or admin cost is $50 or so an hour, $300 isn't a material amount, and there are use cases where it's not just about whether a single VM less or more than the cost of a single physical server.

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