From a lot of problems I see on the forums here, it appears that there are a few things people need to do regularly (my self included) that they do not do-
I'll get the ball rolling with a couple of suggestions-

• Make sure your contact info is up to date- and that it is not an address associated with your account- i.e., if nothing else, get a gMail account in case your site goes down.
• Backup, backup, backup. make and keep regular backups of your site- it doesn't take that long, and it can save your hair (pulling out of)

Anyone else with tips for worst case scenario suggestions?

(These suggestions would be for anyone using any host- not just LP).

When contacting Support concerning an issue you may be experiencing whether by email or the Trouble Ticket System, remember to include all account information in your corrospondance such as:

* your primary domain name
* alternate email address (especially good if your account email is down)
* your username (for the account)
* a working phone number in case we should need to contact you
* the server your account is on
* the last 4 digits of the credit card you have on file for the account (or the account's password)
* the type plan you have (Basic/Business/VPS/Dedicated/Windows)
* as much information as you can provide pertaining to the issue you are experiencing

This goes a long way in aiding us to a speedy resolution of the issue you have reported. And remember that all support requests are handled in the order in which they are received.

Reason I added this is because a lot of support tickets/emails are submitted with little to no account information included. This increases the time for a resolution by a Tech having to request it for testing purposes.

A little bit of information on the original ticket/email goes a long way in a speedy resolution to an issue. 

Backing up is always good and should be done all the time.

What I did was made any page changes on my local system and then uploaded it so i always had a local copy. I then had a cron job backup the sql file and I would download it so I could keep my records. However, I never backed up my e-mail. Since I got my dedicated server, the server backs up everything everyday and uploads to to the backup server which is really nice.

Also, to add to what Merlin said, be sure that you explain everything about your issue, give examples, error messages, including what you have tried to fix the issue. The more information our support department receives, the better we can narrow the situation down to a specific issue and fix it faster.

Yea, unfortunately in my case Cpanel broke all of my sites and I'm still trying to recover from all of that mess.

At least it did one thing right (which is it made a backup every day and saved it to another server). Last night for example, I forgot to transfer my main database from my old server to my new one and my old one was already formatted. I went to the backup server and it had a copy of the most recent database there so I was able to recover easily

It was on a dedicated setup. For some odd reason it decided that it no longer needed Apache and PHP on my server so it just got rid of everything (It doesn't make any sense but it took me forever for it (Cpanel that is) to get it to reinstall Apache and PHP cause it would just die or say that it could not complete).

Either way, I'm free of Cpanel now and am no longer bothered with it's limits

yea, I love webmin as well. It is also helpful when some command takes a long time to process and times out my connection with the SSH terminal.

If Support needs all that specific information from users, why not just put required fields on the submission form so that the needed info must be filled in before the support ticket can be submitted?

Would it be useful to have optional fields then, serving as prompts for pertinent details?