Fore-note: This is a blog post from our ‘how to’ series written collaboratively with Dejvid Sherri.

At Cloud68.co we offer and maintain infrastructure for individuals and organizations that can basically host open source software themselves. With free libre open source software you have more freedoms to use the software as you wish and with some relatively cheap hardware you can do everything yourself (DYI style) or outsource the ‘behind the scenes’ work to another entity like ours. Interestingly, many organizations choose to trust teams like ours for their digital infrastructure, even if they can do everything ‘in house’. There are many reasons this happens. Some of our partners seem to trust their infrastructure to us, because they want to spend their time in doing their actual work and not maintaining their digital infrastructure. Others seem to like the fact that they have only one bill for team members on-boarding, server space, sysadmin working hours and technical support. Early this year though, we gradually understood that one of the most important things in the list of services we offer was the quality of our technical support. In practice, this means that our tech support team strives to approach every request for support very seriously and we aim to offer the same quality of support that we expect ourselves from others. We imagine our tech support to be similar to a local bio store where you get not only good quality food, but also the owner of the shop knows you by your name. Many digital infrastructure companies try to offer support using automation based tools. This might lower the operational costs, which means more financial gains for these companies, but with major negative impact for the end users. Half the time you’re not sure if you’re talking to an AI or an actual human being and the end result is… lacking empathy. For us, that’s far away from our ‘human support’ philosophy. It’s not easy, but it seems the only way reaching our ultimate goal: making it easy for every solopreneur, SME and organisation to use free open source digital infrastructure. We offer tech support through the following communication channels, which are also the best way of getting in touch with our team even if you are not an actual Cloud68.co partner. We would be mega happy to follow up with you :)

Actual partners

We try to make your life easier by offering multiple ways of getting support. From our experience sending emails seems to be the preferred way of getting support from our team.

Through our support email or support.cloud68.co

This is the most monitored channel and has the fastest response time - I personally make sure of that! This can be done two ways, either by sending an email here or by going to this link and accessing the support interface. In both cases our lovely Zammad open source ticket management software makes sure to help us make the management of your request easier. As a partner we can provide you with an account with which you can sign in by inputting the credentials we will provide. You can request for one by sending us an email here. Once you’re in you will see this interface:

In this case no tickets are open however for partners who have sent an email before at our support email you might have tickets open. As you can see to create a ticket you can either click on ‘Create your first ticket’ or by clicking the + on the bottom left corner. You will be prompted with this screen afterwards:

In which you can start describing your issue. The title is suggested to be as short as it can and whenever something is urgent its great to have it there. In the text section it’s great to describe the issue in as much detail as possible and a screenshot when needed. This will help us determine the issue quickly and respond asap. Click on the ‘Create’ button and your ticket will be made and our team will be notified.

After we have responded you can either close the issue or you can reply to us if it is fixed or not and we can close it for you. To close the issue you can open the dropdown menu on the top right corner and select the ‘closed’ option and then click the ‘Update button on the bottom right corner. To reply to us you can type on the space named ‘Enter Note or select attachment…‘

Schedule a call

This is another easy way to get support. To schedule a call is simple all you have to do is go to this link and click on ‘Book Now’. You will be redirected to our calendar in which you can choose a time & day, add your name and email and then finalize the process. Our team will send you a link with a BigBlueButton call.

Potential partners and general inquiries.

If you have general inquiries or happen to be a friend of ours from the librehosters network you can contact us through one of our communcation channels below.

Contact form

To access our contact form you can go to this link. You can add your name, email and the message you want to send then click on ‘Send your message’ which will send an email to us.

Schedule a call

You can schedule a call by going here and clicking ‘Book Now’ Choose your time and date and you can finalize the process.

Good old fashion chat

We welcome actual partners, friends and bots at chat.cloud68.co for a casual chat at our Mattermost channel. This is mainly for non essential services, just hanging around and talking to each other. 🙂

In the future…

This is how we operate at the moment, but in the near future we plan to: Expand our support team, following the addition of Dejvid; Add more support channels including, but not limited to Twitter, chat on our website and more to improve the quality of our technical support based on your feedback.

What do you think about this setup? Do you have any proposals? Feel free to… contact us. 🙂