Why do You need Customer Support?
As the market segment gets more and more saturated, most webhosting companies in the industry will compete for your attention with ever increasingly bigger and better offers such as,
…5X extra bandwidth…”, or “…Terabyte storage space…”
As file size gets bigger by the minute, especially with videos, it is only logical that you will need all the resources you can get. For a couple of bucks, it’s indeed hard to resist these offers. However, what you may not have known is that, to cover such a low price, these bargain hosts will cramp up as many users as they possibly can to maximize their Return-of-Investments (”ROI”).
Overselling isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Just like the every sword has two-sides, overselling has its up and down sides. The really good thing about overselling is that we, as consumers, get to buy an affordable hosting package. Then again, it does indeed over-stretch the server’s life quite a bit. With the constant access to the server, 24/7, 365-days, it is only time when the server will crash. The server crashing isn’t the big issue here; it’s what comes after that.
Insufficient Resources
Due to the fact that they are bargain hosts, they may not have enough resources to employ extra staff to handle customer support, especially in a crisis moment. If you are not running a business site, it’s still ok for you to have your website down for the time being. However, business relying on their sites to profit is going to lose a significant portion of their revenue due to the downtime.
Your live chat attempt might be redirected to a “please create a ticket” page, because they are short-handedly handling the already numerous chats before you. Its ok you might think. Just create a ticket and wait for them to reply. Even if your tickets are replied, it may take quite a while before you get any response. The reason is because your ticket is among the hundreds in queue daily. You might already be losing a lot by then and not even their uptime guarantee will cover for it.
All these will only add stress for you. What seems to be a bargain at the beginning can end up costing more than it should.
Time is Money
For most small businesses, maintaining a website is a tedious task. There are so many things to manage and sometimes, time is not on your side – and time is money. Why do you have to wait around? Wouldn’t you rather spend your time doing something constructive than waiting for your host for hours at a time, just for an email reply?
That is why getting a host that provides excellent customer support is extremely vital. Not just customer support, but support that is friendly and prioritizes you as a valued customer. Even if nothing ever happens at your host like the scenario above, you are still going to need your hosts’ immediate assistance with certain issues such as billing, domain, database or scripting errors.
With a business website, it doesn’t hurt for you to shop for a host that doesn’t sell itself on price. Resources are important too, but in reality, you won’t even use more than 40% of what is allotted to you. Even if you need extras, you can buy more for just a few dollars monthly. However, very few hosts will truly value you as a customer and take care of you like as if you are a friend.
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