This. I have a spreadsheet. Three columns: provider, advertised response, actual MTTR from my tickets.
The correlation is weak. The best is a German provider with 24h SLA that averages 3 hours. The worst was a "15 minute response" brand that took 4 days to fix a corrupted snapshot chain.
I would pay 2x for better MTTR. I would not pay 2x for more channels with same MTTR.
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WireGuard tunnel to my home lab, rsync every 6 hours, DNS failover to backup VPS on different provider. Total cost maybe 150% of single VPS, but I am my own support at 3am and I know exactly when things break.
For people who cannot do this, paying 2x for actual support is rational. For people who can, it is not. The poll should have third option: "I engineer around bad support."
I tried the "engineer around it" approach with two cheap providers and a failover IP. Worked great until both were in the same OVH Strasbourg datacenter during the 2021 fire. Now I pay more for geographic diversity and I include support quality in that calculation.
Not exactly 2x, maybe 1.6x. But I sleep better.
This is the critical point everyone misses. Support quality and infrastructure diversity are separate axes. You can pay premium for support and still be single-homed. You can multi-home cheaply and still have no one to call.
For production prefixes I run dual-homed with different RIR regions and maintain premium NOC access on the transit side only. The compute itself is commodity. The routing is not.
Lucgone's bakery doesn't need this. But "pay double for support" presumes the support is actually competent, which is vendor-specific and not price-correlated.
OK I understand now. Is not simple "2x = good support". But my original question is still: if you find provider with same specs, same location, but one is 3€ with email ticket 24h and other is 6€ with live chat + phone + fast answer, you take which?
I think for me the answer is 6€. Even if the support is only little better, for 3€ more I have less stress. My time is not free.
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I pay my current VPS in crypto through a privacy reseller. Support is email-only and slow, but they don't ask for passport scans and they don't care what I host.
For me this is the feature. I would pay 2x for *less* support interaction, not more. Different threat model.
But I recognize I am weird case. For normal business, lucgone's logic is sound.
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I run scrap hardware in Riga basement for homelab, but for actual public services I use Time4VPS because they answer tickets in Lithuanian and Russian, sometimes English, and I know what to expect.
Would I pay 2x for live chat? No. Because I have seen what "live chat" means at that price point: outsourced script readers in India who cannot access anything. Better to have slow email with engineer who has shell access.
Price is not signal for support quality in budget market.
Following this thread because I am currently choosing between Contabo and Netcup for new project. Both have reputation for "you get what you pay" support. So if someone has actual experience with their live chat or phone options, I am interested.
From reading above, seems like "2x for support" is only worth it if you verify the support is actually competent, not just faster to say "we escalate this."
Netcup has no live chat or phone for standard accounts. Only ticket. Their "premium support" is still ticket but with faster SLA and costs extra monthly fee, not 2x hardware.
Contabo has phone but I have heard only for sales, not technical. And in German business hours mostly.
So your 2x scenario may not exist at this price tier. The providers with real 24/7 phone are starting at 50€/month and up, not 6€.
I used to work with a small agency that paid Rackspace $800/month for single server because of their "fanatical support." The support was indeed fast and competent. They also had 99.99% uptime SLA that actually paid out when they missed it.
Was it worth 10x what DigitalOcean would cost? For them, yes, because their clients were law firms and downtime meant malpractice exposure. For a bakery? Absolutely not.
The "2x" question is unanswerable without knowing revenue at risk and alternative cost of downtime.
