24 hour support

In case you don't want to spend too much time with any Drupal chat / support system configuration and development, you can use some external application. Advantage of this solution is, that it is faster to configure and all perfomance needs handles external server. Disadvantage is costs, of course.

But, it is easy to calculate what is best for you.

In last time I spent much hours with helpdesk tool, which I really like - Live Agent.

I'm working with a company that has a number of affiliates with websites. We want to change the base platform for those sites, and a hosted Drupal solution looks like it might be the best option. I've been considering Drupal Gardens, where we'd create a "template site" and new users would upload that theme and basic setup into their own Drupal instance. The sticky issue for us is support. Our affiliates are not Drupal admins or even particularly technically proficient. They need someone to call to walk them through the process of creating a page, uploading an image, modifying a menu, etc.

I'm grappling with a discussion about the costs of supporting drupal vs. proprietary solutions. Some say that there are steep hidden costs in supporting Drupal, and that a proprietary solution is cheaper overall because it comes with that guarantee of up time, and packaged support.