The whole public holiday/non-working hours issue can be solved simply by having people scattered across the globe. I understand with some of the smaller VPS providers this is quite difficult to achieve; but with the abundance of people (from what I've seen) willing to act as interns, it's not that unrealistic. Obviously some might see communication between team members as a challenge but with collaborative issue-tracking software, that also seems to be at least decently resolved.
What we have is a prime example of what I call an ideal setup, there's a couple of us covering the European hours and a couple of us covering the Asian + Australian hours. Essentially what that means is that we've got pretty much the whole day covered. I'm not sure if @concerto49 has any fancy graphs or statistics for response times but I'm pretty sure working like this gives us a much lower average response + resolution time than what we would have otherwise.