Reseller Hosting - Why your Web Host must provide Toll Free Phone Support
Posted by Rich Brodsky | Filed under Business
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.
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.
Sometimes a web hosting customer will have a login/password issue, need some help with a piece of code or have some other issue that requires actual text be sent back and forth between the client and the tech. In other cases, the issue at hand may simply not be that urgent and the customer does not require the immediacy that phone support can bring. Without a doubt, every serious web hosting company must have some type of web and/or email based ticketing system to serve their customers.
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 do you do now? Sure, you can go ahead and submit a support ticket to your host and hope that someone will beat their 24 hour response time guarantee, but there you are dead in the water and at the mercy of some queue based ticketing system. Your hopes of a productive evening are out the window.
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, 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.
Tags: Business
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