Reseller Hosting - Why your Web Host must provide Toll Free Phone Support
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by: RichBrodsky
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Have you ever found yourself unable to receive your email or bring up your website at 1am on a Sunday morning and your only recourse is to submit a support ticket to your host and wait up to 24 hours for a reply? Is that any way to run a business? What if you've signed up for a reseller hosting plan with this host? Can your customers really afford to wait? Yet, that is the way a great many web hosting businesses function these days, as it has become an unfortunate but acceptable way of doing business in the web hosting industry.
In order to cut costs, many web hosting companies rely only on some type of web based ticketing or email based support system. Don't get me wrong, these types of web based and email based technical support tracking systems are essential and in many cases a preferred method of providing technical support to a web hosting customer.
In some instances, a customer will have a simple login and password issue that would best be resolved by sending text directly to the customer. In other cases, the support request may not be an urgent one and the customer's request does not carry the urgency that phone support might require. Some type of email and web based support system is always a necessary part of any serious hosting operation.
But let's take a look at that 1AM Sunday morning crisis again. You're just about ready to shut down for the night, when your email box becomes filled with panicked cries of help from your clients, telling you they can't bring up their sites or get their email.
What can you do now? You can submit a ticket to your hosting company's help desk and just hope that someone will see it and jump on it right away, but you're basically operating blindly, dead in the water and at the mercy of some web based ticket queue. It's not going to be a fun night.
Here's another example. What if one of your customers is suddenly experiencing some strange intermittent database issue that you can't diagnose yourself and you need to get in contact with your host. You send a ticket in describing the issue as best you can and even in a best case scenario with a hosting company that guarantees a ticket response time in under an hour, you get a reply from the tech asking you for your client's IP. You send that in, wait another 45 minutes to an hour before receiving another reply from the tech informing you that the ip is not being blocked, how about performing a traceroute and sending that in now? You see where this is going. Many frustrating hours of back and forth with a tech support agent before your relatively simple issue is finally resolved.
Imagine now, the same scenario, but instead of using the ticketing system, you can just pick up the phone at any time of the day or night and reach your hosting company's tech support department via a toll free 800 number. Within a matter of minutes, you've explained the situation in detail to the tech and he has offered a solution. Your customer is back in business and you can get on with your life. It's a beautiful thing.
While every hosting company must have some type of web based ticketing system to serve their customers and resellers, 24x7 toll free telephone technical support is a crucial resource for anyone who is serious about web hosting and in particular, reseller hosting. If you are a reseller and your clients rely on you for their online businesses, then toll free phone support is absolutely essential.
About the Author
Rich Brodsky, owner of 1Host Web Hosting for over a decade, offers unlimited reseller hosting plans with toll free phone support 24x7x365.
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