If you’re a web hosting reseller and your clients can’t access their accounts at 1AM on a Sunday morning, what do you do? You’re at the mercy of your web host and if they’re like many other hosting companies, your only way of contacting them is through some type of web based ticketing system. But what about your customers? Can they really afford to wait up to 24 hours for a response from your hosting company? Unfortunately, that’s just the way it is with many web hosting companies these days. Even if you’ve signed up for a reseller hosting plan with your host, the only means of contact they provide is through some type of web based ticketing system or through email.
Obviously it’s much cheaper to simply reply on a web based ticketing system or email. Web based systems and email based technical support are a critical part of any hosting company’s technical support operations.
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 get back to 1Am on Sunday morning again. Let’s say like many web designers, coders and programmers, you like to work late into the night and that’s the time you finally have to sit down and bang out some much needed work on your new site. You make yourself a cup of coffee and fire up your browser only to see some dreaded error, telling you your site is unreachable.
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.
How about this scenario. One of your clients is intermittently getting booted from the FTP server. You’ve banged your head against the wall, but you can’t seem to resolve it on your own and you need help from your hosting company. You submit a ticket describing the issue as best you can and wait for a reply. Even with a company that guarantees a response in under an hour, you wait. Finally you get a reply asking fro the IP of your client. You send that back to the tech. 45 minutes later he replies asking if your client has any Firewall set up. You reply back that he does not. And so on and so on into the wee hours of the morning it goes. It could be all night before this simple issue is finally resolved for your client.
Now let’s take a look at this same situation, but in this case you have 24 hour access, 7 days a week to your hosting company’s tech support department through a toll free 800 number. You dial up your host’s tech support department and within a few minutes, you are able to explain the issue and the tech is able to offer a solution. You are back in business and your client is a happy camper.
While every hosting company must have some type of web based ticketing system to serve their customers and resellers, 24×7 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.