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When your computer goes haywire, you typically have to pay through the nose to make things right. Microsoft, for example, charges a per-incident fee of $59 for basic issues, while an online or phone session with BestBuy’s GeekSquad will range from $70 to $270, depending on the severity of your needs. iYogi, an Indian company that provides outsourced, personal tech support for $119 per year, has raised a $9.5 million second round of funding to undercut its Western competitors and try to become a global brand.

While many services have been moving offshore for the last decade, most of them have been components of larger companies seeking to cut personnel costs on back-office jobs. But more recently, a handful of companies have gone offshore to offer services directly to consumers. Last year, we wrote about Sunday, a company offering 24/7 personal assistants based in India. There is also TutorVista, an offshore tutoring service charging $99 per month for unlimited sessions. iYogi’s personal tech support model is part of this trend.

The concept faces some obstacles. Dell famously stopped employing Indian tech support after a number of customers complained about difficulty understanding Indians’ English, and this issue, along with angst about American jobs going overseas, is not easily addressed. But iYogi says it hopes to sell customers on its consistent performance. Vishal Dhar, the company’s spokesman, claims that its staff resolves 87 percent of problems and that out of its 50,000 customers, 93 percent are satisfied with its service.

iYogi offers support both over the phone and online, although currently only handles problems with Windows software. Soon, customers will be able to access transcripts and phone logs of every incident online. They will also eventually be able to deploy desktop software that will enable iYogi technicians to monitor customers’ computers for problems like spyware and viruses and fix them before the customer is even aware they exist. It also intends to offer data recovery. Dhar says the company has stringent processes in place to protect its customers’ data so that, unlike competitor the Geek Squad, iYogi will not steal your porn. Support for Apple is coming at some vague point in the future.

SAP Ventures led the round, which included repeat investments from Canaan Partners and SVB India Capital Partners. iYogi had previously raised $3.1 million, bringing the total raised to $12.6 million. The company plans to use the money to grow from 450 to over 1,000 employees by April and expand its focus from the US, UK, and Canada to Australia and then Singapore.

Alfresco Software is the latest player hoping to kill high-priced software for large companies.

It’s one of a number of vendors of “content management” software. But it’s open source, and dirt cheap relative to others in the so-called enterprise content management (ECM) sector: Filenet (IBM), Interwoven, Documentum, Vignette, and Microsoft’s Sharepoint. Many of these emerged from the last Web boom, but they’re looking less dynamic these days.

Alfresco lets companies manage their documents online, and also lets them do everything from store those documents securely to keep them out of the wrong hands if they are sensitive.

The London, UK company has raised $9 million in a third round of financing led by SAP Ventures, bringing total funding to $19 million. Existing investors Accel Partners and Mayfield Fund also joined the round

Alfresco was built from scratch with Web 2.0 capabilities, including more seamless collaborative features. Employees at many large companies have started communicating through Facebook, for example, so Alfresco moved to make sure its application was built into Facebook’s platform (see screenshots, below). It has also built an application for iGoogle.

“Demand is going through the roof,” said John Powell, founder and CEO. He said the company is headed toward profitability, now that it has signed up hundreds of customers including five of the top ten investment banks, Electronic Arts, KLM and H&R Block. The company is about to hit an annual run rate of $10 million in revenue, Powell said. He adding he thinks the company will “be able to go public in 2009.”

Updated

Zend Technologies, the Cupertino start-up that sells software to develop Web sites based on the popular PHP scripting language, has raised $20 million in a fourth round of venture capital (release here).

By raising so much cash, the company must be aiming to produce a substantial return to make it worthwhile for its investors. It had already raised $16 million.

PHP is hot right now. Zend supports open source PHP initiatives, but it also offers commercial PHP products for software developers, and counts companies like gaming company Amp’d and social networking site Tagged among its customers. PHP does have is competitors. See our background on Zend and PHP here. Still, the company says PHP is the language of choice behind more than half of all Ajax-enabled site (Ajax being the highly interactive technology used, for example, in Google Maps).

This may also be a sign the company plans to go it alone for some time, at least if you believe the announcements by the company’s execs. Earlier this year, we reported that Oracle was in talks to acquire the company (scroll down). But now co-founder Andi Gutmans says he’s considering an IPO (Venturewire, sub required).

The round was led by Greylock Partners. Existing investors — Azure Capital Partners, Index Ventures, Intel Capital, Platinum Venture Capital, SAP Ventures and Walden Israel Venture Capital — also participated.

Correction: An earlier version of our post said Digg and Facebook were customers, something we’d seen referenced in the VentureWire piece cited above, and which do use PHP. However, turns out they are not Zend customers.