Web Hosting - Life Time Deal or Long Term Deal & Community based support

Good afternoon evening from the UK, it did start off as a short question but has grown somewhat, sorry in advance!

After reading other community / landing page posts I've pondered a couple of web hosting ideas and am interested to see what others think.

Background

I have been assisting a creative / design agency with web support issues for the last 10+ years and know my way around hosting and domains.
After investigating issues for one of their clients I started developing a website focused tool, based around website caching and page load performance. The target market for the tool is small / medium businesses, and other 1 or 2 person creative / design agencies in the UK.

These types of agencies are less likely to have dedicated / in-house web specialists and would seek support from someone else when needed. Offering them an automated tool to provide reports on their own / clients sites would be a time saver for them vs manual process or using multiple tools, plus it could be bundled in the agencies own offering as a value add for clients.

Web hosting would be a good complementary product to offer as a low cost add-on to my planned tool, for those in need of better web hosting. For other Brits think of Fish & Chips, my tool is the Fish.

The tool itself would hopefully be the main revenue earner. It is a bit niche, but there is one other similar offering out there which covers 1/4 of my overall offering, so I believe there is value to be shown once I build up awareness.

I have found a quality web hosting reseller with a UK based platform so I could offer local hosting in GBP, rather than USD. I wouldn't be building the platform, a professional team does that part. Based on reseller costs and projected revenue for the different plans I'd need to gain 10 customers per year to cover the reseller fees.
I would offer general purpose Linux + mysql, and managed WordPress hosting, with slightly different price points. Offering Windows / VPS would likely cause more support issues than the target audience would need.

The Ideas

Not completely new, but not widely seen in the UK, at least with a quality hosting offering. Unlimited bandwidth and enough disk space for any legal website.

A. Life Time Deal UK based Web hosting - As it says on the tin. Pay up front for a particular tier of hosting and that's it, apart from domain renewals at standard pricing, could still buy elsewhere if wished to. Usual tiers for single or multiple sites, good for a medium business with multiple brands / child sites, not the next ebay etc.

B. Buy 2 Years Get 1 Free Long Term Deal - Similar to option 1, however this time one upfront payment to cover 3 years of hosting - you only pay for the cost of two of them. This could have more recurring revenue than the life time deal.

Customer Support for both A & B
Offering good customer support is the real cost behind web hosting, which as a one man band would be harder to cover 24x7. This is where the "community" based support idea comes in.

Support for the hosting would be offered via forum, where authorised community helpers can offer assistance for those needing help. Ideally there would be different people around the world to help cover different time zones / holiday periods.
For example someone raising an issue in the UK evening could get an initial answer by someone in the USA during their evening, meaning some level of response by the following morning.

I'd provide the official helpers with free hosting of their own to use as they wish (the carrot), plus an extra multi site 'sandbox' account that they can play around with while learning, or taking screen shots of settings as required to assist in answering support queries.

The helper would not have any access to customer details or the back end platform etc as they would in affect be a normal user. Ideally for 9/10 issues they could potentially help, either by pointing to existing support material, or providing an initial "we'll look into this" response if it needs to be passed up. This would allow me to focus on the level 2 / level 3 issues which would need to be escalated to the reseller's team.

Questions

Q1 - If you were a small business, looking at a new hosting provider, which of these hosting plans sounds more trust worthy?
Q2 - To benefit from a great price on quality hosting would you consider community support to be a good thing? This would be made clear its offered that way before sign up.
Q3 - Any alarm bells that you can think of with these payment ideas + support method?

Thank you very much for reading, and good night!