Dear Maintainer,
*** Please consider answering these questions, where appropriate ***

   * What led up to the situation?

Another application had issues starting, hanging for 20+ minutes in its init.d startup script

   * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
     ineffective)?

Unable to to anything as couldn't get to server!

Unable to access server as ssh server not started yet and console login waiting for application to start before it starts login console (or alternative consoles)

   * What was the outcome of this action?

Had to wait for application startup script to timeout before accessing server

   * What outcome did you expect instead?

Would like to be able to access ssh server ealier in boot (i.e. first service to be started after network).
Not sure how you specify this in the /etc/init.d/ssh startup script or if its even possible within the Debian configuration.
The other alternative would be the console login service starts the alternative consoles early in the boot
so you can get in an diagnose why an application startup script is hanging!

*** End of the template - remove these lines ***

In practice it was extremely difficult to make everyone happy doing this
in non-dependency-based sysvinit.  In wheezy, it was started at S16, and
I think any earlier ran into deadlocks in some situations.

However, in jessie you should find that either you're using
dependency-based boot with sysvinit, or you're using a fundamentally
smarter init daemon (systemd or upstart).  In any of those cases, you
should find that sshd starts pretty much as early as possible in
practice.

I don't think that it would be a good idea to try to change this in
wheezy at this point, I'm afraid.  I would be concerned about
introducing more serious boot ordering bugs in the process.

Cheers,