Per Domain Plans
Perhaps, the easiest to comprehend. Here your support partner will charge you based on the total number of domains that he's liable to serve. However, to ensure that they do not end up monitoring your helpdesk 24 hours a day for $5-6/m only, there is a set number of domains you must pay for whether utilized or not. Thus by incurring a fixed monthly cost, you keep the service alive.

Think of it as a necessary expense of hosting business even when you do not have many domains to provide support to. At the same time, you should be looking for a partner that keeps the minimum level as low as possible and appreciates start-up resellers.

You can easily spot technical support partners providing per domain plans from $0.80 to $2.0 each for packages requiring anywhere from 75 to 10 domains only.

Per Ticket Plans
Not all hosting customers exhibit the identical behavior when it comes to calling for technical support. Some will simply try all other means before contacting you and often get their issue resolved via an experienced friend. Others will make sure not a penny goes wasted and will probably be watching your services more than yourself. A Per ticket plan thus sounds very logical.

You buy tickets in advance and as long the counter is standing on its last leg, your clients are taken care of. Just like the per domain plan, there's a minimum number of tickets that you must buy and beware that most of the time they'll be expired in 30 days. So it's wise to start-off with a smaller number and add more if your customers belong to the "why my back hurts?" category.

Per Server Plan
Contrary to what the name may suggest, in essence, these are simply Per Domain Plans with a very high minimum level. Of course they bring in the economy of scale but not as much as the freedom to host unlimited domains and not worry about the support cost at all.

All server level plans have a limit on total number of domains that your support partner will serve. Mostly this limit is set to 500 domains, and plans can be bought for $150 to $200 per month.

Other Issues & Plans
Many outsourcing support providers are creating innovative plans to address the dynamic needs of ever evolving hosting industry.

Multiple domain hosting emerged in last couple of years, as a solid alternative to reseller plans for those on a very low budget. Now HostWorks.ca delivers a breakthrough outsource support plan for those selling multiple domain hosting. For as low as $1.2, you could be guaranteeing 24/7 technical support to one main account and 4 resold ones.

Then there are other companies that will package all of your resold domains under a discounted plan. By the way, these resold domains are the ones that your resellers have sold to their hosting customers. Though, webmasters of these domains will never contact you or the support partner directly, yet indirect requests will come through the main account of the reseller. And you must make a provision for the support of these resold domains as well.

In the third part of this article, we'll review plans from some of the top providers of outsourced technical support.