Amazon Web Services announced on Thursday the availability of its AWS Premium Support, which offers technical assistance for customers of the Amazon Simple Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS).

The support programs are as follows: AWS Premium Support (Silver) for business day technical support and four hours to two business days response time, depending on how severe the issues are. For this particular plan, customers will need to pay $100 per month or $0.10 per dollar of total monthly usage of the applicable AWS service, with access to an unlimited number of support cases.

The AWS Premium Support (Gold) offers, in addition to the Silver plan, around-the-clock phone support and one-hour response time for urgent matters for $400 per month or $0.10-$0.20 per dollar of total monthly usage of the applicable AWS services, based on the amount of AWS service usage, the company unveiled.

"Increasingly, businesses that depend on AWS Infrastructure Services have asked for deeper levels of technical support," said Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Product Management and Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services, in a statement. "With today's launch of AWS Premium Support, customers who experience operational issues or have technical questions can now contact our team of AWS developer support engineers and count on guaranteed response times and one-on-one support to help bring their issues to resolution."

Customers can opt for the AWS Premium Support from their account, during the Amazon S3, EC2 or SQS sign up process, the company said.

Together with the technical support plans, Amazon also unveiled the Service Health Dashboard, which provides information on the status of each service with the help of three colors, green, yellow or red. This service will be available through the Web or RSS feed. Customers won’t have to pay additional fees for the Service Health Dashboard.