Two weeks away and I am the only person who answers support: what do people actually do?

On the daily check, since that is the option most people land on: it works, and only if you make it a hard boundary rather than a habit.

What I do:

One session a day, at a fixed time, twenty minutes. Not first thing, not last thing. Somewhere in the middle where it cannot colonise the morning or ruin the evening.

Triage, do not solve. Three piles: genuine emergency, quick reply, waits until I am back. Only the first two get touched. Most things go in the third pile and everybody survives.

Reply to the third pile with one line saying you have seen it and when you will answer properly. That single line is most of what people want, and it costs seconds.

Notifications off the rest of the day. The daily check only protects the holiday if the inbox is not also live in your pocket.

On hiring someone unfamiliar for a fortnight: I would not, for support. They cannot answer product questions and the damage from a wrong answer outlasts the holiday. If you were going to spend that money, spend it on the product fix in the first answer instead - it keeps paying after you get back.

And the one thing worth arranging regardless: make sure somebody who is not you can restore the service if it goes down. That is a different problem from support and it is the one that would genuinely ruin the trip.

The work is done in the two weeks before you go, not during. Almost everything that makes this survivable is preparation.

Pull your last two hundred tickets and count the categories. You will find a small number of questions account for most of the volume, usually password and login, billing and invoices, one confusing part of the product, and one bug people keep hitting. That list is your whole task.

Then, for each:

Write the answer once, properly, somewhere public. A help page, a short doc. Not because people read documentation, but because you can link to it in one line instead of typing the answer.

Fix the one that is a product problem. If a fifth of your tickets are people confused by the same screen, two days of work before your holiday removes a fifth of your inbox permanently. This is the highest-return thing in this entire thread and people never do it, because answering feels urgent and fixing feels optional.

Put the top three answers where the question is asked - next to the billing page, next to the confusing screen, in the signup email.

Do that and the fortnight's volume is meaningfully lower before you leave, which changes every other option from impossible to manageable.

Then be honest in the autoresponder, and specific. People are far more accepting than you expect, and vagueness is what annoys them.

What works:

Say you are away and give a date. Not away from the office, away until the fourteenth. A date lets people decide whether to wait.

Say who you are. A one-person business saying so gets enormous latitude. Customers understand a person taking a holiday and do not understand a company being unavailable.

Link the three most common answers directly in the autoresponder. A meaningful share of people solve their own problem right there and never send a second email.

Give an escape route for genuine emergencies - a phrase they can put in the subject line that you actually check for. Almost nobody abuses this. The people who use it are usually right.

What does not work: promising to reply to everything on your return, then not. If you know you will only get to half of it, do not promise all of it.

One thing worth doing that costs nothing: email your customers before you go, briefly. People who know in advance mostly do not write, and the ones who need something write early while you are still there.