Paid support?

[fiabledotbiz]

Hello.

Does anyone know of an organisation who would provide paid support for Fedora?

[fpmurphy]

There are lots of organizations and companies that provide paid support for CentOS, Red Hat or Fedora. If you told us where you are located, it might help.

[DBelton]

I would choose community support over paid support any day.

1: Community support is usually from other people using the same product and a lot of times in the same ways that you are trying to use it. So, chances are you will be getting help from someone that actually has experienced the problem you are trying to fix.

2: Community support is often times faster than a phone call to get the paid support.

3: Paid support costs a lot, because there are a lot of calls, which requires lot of people, which means you have more level 1 and less level 3 people(proportionately anyways), which makes those people overworked, which lowers the qualify of their work(again if only proportinately). But the costs don't go down(indeed, they tend to go up). So the perceived value of support goes down.

Really, about the only reason for paid support nowadays is so that company executives can "pass the buck" when something goes wrong.

I am not referring to the paid support options to just get software updates, that is a different category.

But, after that little rant.. fpmurphy is correct. There are numerous options available, with just about any of the companies offering linux support being able to support fedora.

[fiabledotbiz]

Thank you.
Fiable.biz is a web site creation business located in the city of Precious (Эрдэнэт), Mongolia. My experience (not in Fedora, admittedly, but as Mandriva and Ubuntu user) is that the community support is usually OK, but sometimes too slow, and, sometimes, one just doesn't get any answer. (And I would not be so surprised if my present problem fall in this last category: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=270635 )

[Gareth Jones]

If you're aiming for corporate services, I wouldn't use Fedora personally.

It sounds like you'd be better off with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is based on Fedora but polished and supported by Red Hat (who also play a big part in Fedora development).

This is all outside my experience though, and I've no idea what's available in Mongolia.

Gareth

[fiabledotbiz]

I don't know why Fiable.biz' geographical location matters so much. Fiable.biz pays a support service to Canonical for another computer. They are in Canada, we're in Mongolia, and the only inconvenience of this is the time zone difference, which (unfortunately) is not the main problem of Ubuntu.

[smr54]

Community support, if in business, is simply not practical. When a mission critical server crashes, you need to be able to get someone at a known time. Even if a support company only works within business hours, that's still a known time.

Canonical, if I remember correctly, does offer per incident support, for the times when the forums, etc., aren't useful. (On the other hand, I've found that most of the time, the O/S won't be the problem, it will be the hardware or the applications).

Edit: I should add, that's in my particular situation, not necessarily everywhere. I can only think of three times in the last few years where it was an O/S issue.

[fiabledotbiz]

This is precisely why I'm looking for a paid support. And I would be delighted if someone, rather that general considerations, give me the URL of a company or a freelancer providing for such a service...

[bob]

Fedora is sort of a test-bed for Red Hat, and if it's paid support you're looking for, then I'd suggest that you buy Red Hat. To my knowledge, there's no company or individual doing what your looking for in the Fedora Project, however it might not hurt to click on the link up top of the page and see if you can ask them directly.

[Gareth Jones]

Fedora very much a community-based distro, with near bleeding-edge software versions. Finding reliable paid support for that is going to be difficult.

If you want decent support from a company that pays programmers who actually work on the Fedora code, your best bet is Red Hat, the closest thing Fedora has to a Canonical. Red Hat's Linux is a bit older than the latest Fedora, but is more "stable" in terms of what companies like. I really doubt you'll find better than that.

Gareth

EDIT: I see bob beat me to it!

[fiabledotbiz]

I see. This is exactly how tourist guides work: inside museums, where everything is written in several languages, one gets proposed a guide, who is not very useful, but when one goes to the jungle, there is no such proposal, though it's the place one would need it the most. ;-)

[bob]

Yes, in this "jungle", when a tiger has you by the butt, you file a Bugzilla giving the exact details so that the developers can make an attempt at giving you a solution or fix the next version...when they get around to it.

So, you're ONE of millions of testers of bleeding-edge stuff. In this jungle, you try to guide yourself as much as possible, ask others for directions or just leave the jungle altogether.

[flyingfsck]

OK, I responded in your problem thread. If you are still stuck by Friday, then I can probably help you then, since the wife is going to Canada for a few weeks, my weekend will be free.

These things are usually easy to fix, one just needs to be systematic: Check the network; Check the running processes; Check the error messages; Install what is missing; Fix the startup sequence, so it starts AFTER the network is completely up...

Send me a PM.