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.
Sure it’s a lot cheaper to simply provide some type of web based solution. And without a doubt these types of systems are critical to any web hosting business and in many cases are even a preferred way of providing technical support.
In some cases, a client may simply need a password reminder or need help with a piece of code that’s best served by sending actual text to the client. Also there are some cases where the support request is simply not that urgent and the client can afford to wait up to 24 hours for a reply.
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.
Or how about this example. What if one one of your clients is having some strange intermittent email issue that you’re unable to diagnose and resolve on your own. You need to contact your host to figure this one out. So you submit a ticket describing the issue as best you can. Even in a best case scenario, where your host guarantees a response in under an hour, you get a reply back from the tech asking for the name of the POP account in question. You reply back with that info and 45 minutes later, the tech replies back asking for the IP address that your client is connecting from. You get the picture. Hours going back and forth with some overworked tech who’s trying to resolve a dozen issues all at once right now. It could take all night before your issue finally gets resolved.
Now imagine that same scenario, but in this case, you can contact your hosting company’s tech support department through a toll free 800 number, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You pick up the phone and dial the tech and within 5 minutes the issue is resolved, you are back in action and your client is happy. Or that 1AM Sunday morning coding session can start anew in a matter of minutes. It’s really a no brainer.
Although web based ticketing systems are an important part of any hosting operation, for both shared web hosting customers and reseller hosting customers, having access to a toll free 800 number 24 hours a day is extremely crucial. If your business is reseller hosting and your clients are counting on you for their businesses, then toll free phone support is essential.