There is nothing wrong with using outsourced support. There are some excellent companies with techs who can write better English than me, and I'm English, and they're from Asia. You just need to pick a reputable company.
I agree that only offering support for 16 hours or so a day is not good. What happens if a customer's site goes down and you have no one else to help with that? That's going to cause your customers to get very impatient and frustrated. I'd rather use outsourced support, so there is always someone to step in, but again, would only give access to servers to a reputable outsourcing company, not some company who's only been running for a year or so.
Why pay one person around £250/week when you can pay the same cost for a massive team of techs for around the same money but pay it every month rather than a week (£750/month saving there plus have 10+ techs rather than just paying for one tech). There is nothing wrong with outsourced support when using reputable companies, IMO. If it cuts down costs and allows you to provide faster response/resolution times, then it's better. It's best to use a combination of outsourced support from a company who specialises in the support plus have at least 1-2 in-house people.
If you're a small provider and jumping on the outsourced support sucks bandwagon just because you don't know a reputable company, please STOP, because a lot of the outsourced techs know their stuff and work hard for less money. If it's because you have academic-professor type English language and only want the best-written language written to your customers, and would rather pay more to hire more individuals, and potentially have slower response/resolution times then feel free, the ones who use reputable outsourced support will get more Sales and usually have happier customers. :salute:
