Idea: Linux for Home

[John Richard Moser]

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Consider the following (sorry for top posting but this is organized).

 - You can get away with paying a phone/shell support tech $13/hr

 - You can get away with paying a tech who goes out $18/hr

 - You will probably average $2/hr higher than these for starting
   salaries

 - You need one tech on call per hour per volume of traffic per tech in
   that hour; so if a tech can handle 5 calls and you get 10 calls an
   hour between noon and 3pm, you need 2 techs during that time

 - You don't need to pay yourself, initially (get a real job)

With 24 hour coverage your minimal costs will fall into $288/day range.
 You could get 2 techs to cover 10 incidents per hour and bring that
into the $576/10 == $57.60/day range per customer at 1 incident per hour
per customer; but you won't start with that many issues.

Two important things come from this:

 - Every customer does not generate one incident per hour.  You may have
   100 customers and generate 1 incident per hour.  This means that
   $288/day becomes $2.88/day cost per customer.  Most importantly, new
   customers will invariably have dozens of incidents at first and then
   stfu; a knowledge base can squelch most of these incidents (techs say
   "Here's our support page on this" and that incident takes 2 minutes
   to read, locate, respond; do 30 per hour per tech).

 - You won't get the volume you need at first; and when you do you can't
   respond in real time.  You need to work by yourself first, and you
   need to deal with support in a ticketed fashion, collecting the
   incident and dealing with it from the queue.

Good luck.

Brian Fahrlander wrote:
>      Mine is a low-tech town. Over seven years I've lived here, taking 
> care of my aging Mom, looking for Linux work that barely exists at all. 
> The 30 years of computing I've been doing means little here; one of my 
> resume qualifications is "mechanically inclined". It has 300,000 people, 
> they're just completely unaware of anything but Windows.
> 
>      Over the years I've felt a strong, strong urge to set up an in-home 
> Linux support company.  Here's the idea:
> 
>      For $50 I come and install, say, Feisty. I set them up with their 
> firewall and ssh. For $20 a month, I'm on-call, so long as I don't have 
> to actually GO anywhere or bring equipment, the fixes are free. For 
> another $10/month, I rsync their home directories for safekeeping.
> 
>      The problem is in trying to replace my job; long before I get 
> enough clients to do this alone, it will demand time that will keep me 
> from getting a job (although once the Fed and the child support are done 
> with it, I make less than $75/week,)
> 
>      When the idea first came up I was on Redhat, and intended to keep 
> the root password so that nothing could be changed, increasing security. 
> But with Ubuntu's ability to add program with ease, I suppose I'll let 
> them keep it.
> 
>      - Is anyone out there doing this in their town?
> 
>      - Ideas?
> 

- --
Bring back the Firefox plushy!
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Is_the_Firefox_plush_gone_for_good
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=322367
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