WEB HOSTING

The most important part of choosing a quality webhosting provider is reliability. However, "reliability" is not the only factor when deciding on a quality webhost to use. If you were to assume that most webhosting companies are technically competent and therefore have consistently upgraded their systems as well as offering products that are well priced, then a major component of web hosting reliability comes down to the quality of their customer service.

What you really want to know is, "If there's a problem with my website, will I get fast and reliable service?"

With inferior webhosting companies, quality customer service can be a major problem. If you've ever talked to a webhosting technical support representative you may get the impression that they are handling three or four calls all at the same time. Bad service can lead to frustrating conversations with your assigned tech person and makes it much more difficult to get the service you need.

For example, we recently had a problem with one of our webhosting providers. The problem had to do with accessing some of our sites to make changes. We have been doing website building for years, and with many different webhosts, but this was the very first time we ever experienced this specific problem.

While we were open to the possibility that the problem is somewhere on our end, it seemed that was unlikely. All of our websites with this webhost seem to have this same issue, and not with any of the other webhosting providers that we use. Regardless, we were looking for some intelligent suggestions to resolve the problem in a timely manner.

To this point we have not been able to get a satisfactory response, even though it has been happening for almost a month. I typically get the standard response: "Have you tried this and that?" All of these responss imply that the problem must be on our end, and none give the impression that they are actually thinking about what is going on with their servers etc.

While we can understand the technical support person's dilemma, we still need to resolve the problem. In our experience, most tech support people have seen these problems in the past, and they probably have the answer. But sometimes, is just very difficult to get them to actually focus on your issue.

This only further confirms what marketing people have been saying for years about "customer service". Customer service is extremely important in every business, but especially with Webhosting providers.

Unfortunately many webhosting tech support personnel don't seem to understand this. They often consider themselves superior to their clients which is mistake. As a result they have been able to get away with unreliable service because it is just too inconvenient for clients to change webhosting providers.

While we we agree that none of this is completely fool proof, you do deserve a great webhosting provider. Also, given the highly competitive nature of the webhosting business, a simple, straightforward customer-focused approach is what you should be looking for in a webhosting provider.