Microsoft has quietly all-but-doubled the cost of ad hoc professional support in the United States.

Visit this page, click the “For Business” tab and then select the “Support for Small and Medium Business” option and you'll see that Redmond now charges US$499 for a single professional support incident, or US$1,999 for a five-pack.

But if you visit archive.org and explore the same page from October 25th, up comes a price of US$259 for one support incident and a five-pack price of US$1,289.

That makes the new five-pack price US$399.80 per incident, up from US$257.80. So at least the discounts for bulk buys are now better.

But the price hikes still represent nasty increases: there's a 92.66 percent hike for single incidents and a 55.08 per cent increase on the five-pack.

Microsoft of course offers Premier support, often with regular payments. These price hikes seem a decent signal that Microsoft's rather keen on that kind of arrangement.

The Reg's exploration of Microsoft's site in other nations and languages – a tricky thing to do given Redmond geo-targets content – doesn't yield conclusive proof the hike is global. ®