| Reseller Hosting - Why your Web Host must provide Toll Free Phone Support |
| Monday, 06 July 2009 23:40 | |||
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If you're a web hosting reseller and you've ever had a flood of support requests from your clients at 1AM on a Sunday morning because a server is down, you know how awful that feeling is when you can't reach your hosting company to resolve the issue. Your only recourse is to submit a support ticket and wait (sometimes up to 24 hours) for a response. Meanwhile your customers are growing angrier by the minute and there's nothing you can do. Unfortunately, that's the way a great many web hosting companies function as it has become an acceptable way of providing technical support to web hosting customers, even those who've signed up for reseller hosting plans. If you're a web hosting reseller and you've ever had a flood of support requests from your clients at 1AM on a Sunday morning because a server is down, you know how awful that feeling is when you can't reach your hosting company to resolve the issue. Your only recourse is to submit a support ticket and wait (sometimes up to 24 hours) for a response. Meanwhile your customers are growing angrier by the minute and there's nothing you can do. Unfortunately, that's the way a great many web hosting companies function as it has become an acceptable way of providing technical support to web hosting customers, even those who've signed up for reseller hosting plans. 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. 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 return to that Sunday morning crisis again. You're just about ready to turn in for the evening, when you start to receive a flood of urgent emails from your customers telling you their sites are 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 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. About the Author: Rich Brodsky, president of 1Host Web Hosting for over a decade, offers unlimited reseller hosting plans with toll free telephone support 24 hours a day.
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