How to: Getting Help and Support
-	**Forums:** For many problems, it’s worth searching or asking for help in the [discussion forums](https://forums.aws.amazon.com/index.jspa) to see if it’s a known issue.
-	**Premium support:** AWS offers several levels of [premium support](https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/).
	-	The first tier, called "Developer support" lets you file support tickets with 12 to 24 hour turnaround time, it starts at $29 but once your monthly spend reaches around $1000 it changes to a 3% surcharge on your bill.
	-	The higher-level support services are quite expensive — and increase your bill by up to 10%. Many large and effective companies never pay for this level of support. They are usually more helpful for midsize or larger companies needing rapid turnaround on deeper or more perplexing problems.
	-	Keep in mind, a flexible architecture can reduce need for support. You shouldn’t be relying on AWS to solve your problems often. For example, if you can easily re-provision a new server, it may not be urgent to solve a rare kernel-level issue unique to one EC2 instance. If your EBS volumes have recent snapshots, you may be able to restore a volume before support can rectify the issue with the old volume. If your services have an issue in one availability zone, you should in any case be able to rely on a redundant zone or migrate services to another zone.
	-	Larger customers also get access to AWS Enterprise support, with dedicated technical account managers (TAMs) and shorter response time SLAs.
	-	There is definitely some controversy about how useful the paid support is. The support staff don’t always seem to have the information and authority to solve the problems that are brought to their attention. Often your ability to have a problem solved may depend on your relationship with your account rep.
-	**Account manager:** If you are at significant levels of spend (thousands of US dollars plus per month), you may be assigned (or may wish to ask for) a dedicated account manager.
	-	These are a great resource, even if you’re not paying for premium support. Build a good relationship with them and make use of them, for questions, problems, and guidance.
	-	Assign a single point of contact on your company’s side, to avoid confusing or overwhelming them.
-	**Contact:** The main web contact point for AWS is [here](https://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/). Many technical requests can be made via these channels.
-	**Consulting and managed services:** For more hands-on assistance, AWS has established relationships with many [consulting partners](https://aws.amazon.com/partners/consulting/) and [managed service partners](https://aws.amazon.com/partners/msp/). The big consultants won’t be cheap, but depending on your needs, may save you costs long term by helping you set up your architecture more effectively, or offering specific expertise, e.g. security. Managed service providers provide longer-term full-service management of cloud resources.
-	**AWS Professional Services:** AWS provides [consulting services](https://aws.amazon.com/professional-services/) alone or in combination with partners.