Been a paid user of elink.io for quite some time - can't remember how long but at least 2 years, closer to 3. I have always been a very satisfied customer. If you are looking to micro-curate content catering for a small niche market, there is NOTHING better out there. The latest site revision a couple of months ago added two new features that are hugely useful: one, you can now re-use content from the Link Library, which is great if a news item is of ongoing interest to customers, and two, you can now re-use the same custom template every week and just click to delete the old content and add new content from the Link Library. The one thing they did in this new version that I *hate* is that they force paid subscribers to have a redirect on their website directing people to "View Original" on elink.io. To my way of thinking, that should only exist for free accounts, not paid ones. Still, that's fixable if you know what you're doing and are comfortable editing embed codes. One can only hope that elink.io survives the coming end cycle of Adobe Flash, because it's still the very best solution out there for what I do.
Answer: Very easy. Once you log in, there's a button showing whether they are online or not. If they are, you can get help immediately. If they're not, it might take 12 hours or so, but I've never not had a response when I had a problem.