Business hours
Monday to Friday 9am-6pm (German time) - those are our business hours, and have been for ages. Most people know that we've been providing support outside of these hours for years, it's just that it's been rather non-committal. Now we want to change that - in fact, we've already changed it. After attracting great new people to our team over the last twelve months and overhauling our internal processes this year, we were able to switch to a new shift system.
Support hours
Since 01.09.2023 our support is permanently staffed from Monday to Saturday daily from 9 am to 0 am (German time)!
Not only does this give us almost complete coverage of the times you create tickets, but it also ensures consistent response times, as tickets are unlikely to pile 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. Normal requests that are received on Sundays will be processed on the same day. Technically very complex tickets, accounting requests or sales-related questions may be handled on the following day. We treat German public holidays as Sundays.
Telephone support and emergency hotline
We will keep our previous phone support hours, so our PHP-Friends phone support will be available Monday through Friday 9am-6pm (German time). This does not affect our emergency hotline - which was already adjusted a year ago to distinguish it from regular phone support. Until then, the hotline was in normal operation 24/7, which could no longer be depicted after we increasingly received non-critical calls at night.
However, it was important to us to continue to offer emergency support by phone that can be reached free of charge at any timeand not (as is the case with some competitors) a chargeable hotline, the costs of which are refunded if the provider is at fault. We had observed that such models have a strong deterrent effect. Ultimately, as a web hosting company, we want you to be able to report any malfunctions of our infrastructure to us without fear of any costs - even if the report turns out to be false. While our monitoring should always detect an actual malfunction before you do, no system is perfect.
Therefore, outside of business hours, our hotline will ask for a ticket to be created in the case of less critical concerns. Afterwards, you can be connected to our emergency support free of charge in the event of a malfunction on our end.
On-call duty
Our on-call service remains available around the clock, 365 days a year, and responds autonomously to alerts from our monitoring system. The response time is usually only a few seconds. Alerts that are not confirmed by the on-call duty after five minutes are escalated to the fallback shift automatically. This shift is scheduled in parallel so that it is also manned 24/7/365 without gaps - just in case.
