When you’re choosing web hosting for your site, customer support service is a very important consideration. Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to know which web hosting company can provide you with the best support. It seems like most web hosting companies advertise their services as award winning, so that’s not always a great way to narrow down your choices.
There are a couple of other situations that can further cloud things up. First, since everyone’s requirements may be slightly different (and there are so many facets to web hosting), where one person might have a great experience with Company X, someone else might not be thrilled with their performance. Also, keep in mind that web hosting companies can change due to reasons such as not being able to keep up with their growing customer load. I’ve had situations where initially I was getting great service from a web host, and then things slowly started to go downhill.
So here are a couple of tips to getting better support with your web hosting. Make sure the company offers live chat support. Surprisingly, there are still a number of hosts that do not have this feature. I’ve found that live chat support is the fastest and most convenient way to getting a problem solved or question answered. Even if you prefer phone or email support instead, having live chat available demonstrates to me that this particular web hosting company is trying to go the extra step in helping their customers.
Another red flag to look out for is having a support person constantly try to sell or upsell you other products. While I admit you may not be able to detect this until after you purchase your hosting, you can contact the company before buying and see how much upselling they try to do. One hosting company, that I’m no longer with, did this kind of constant upsell pitching. Sure enough, I found their support team pretty useless. I’d ask a simple question and the guy literally put me on hold about half a dozen times!
Okay, you want specific names? Just keep in mind that your experiences may differ. I’ve enjoyed great support services from InMotion Hosting, iPage, Bluehost, and Web Hosting Hub. In the case of InMotion, I’ve been using them for many years with great success. Some web hosting companies I’ve had support issues with in the past are Fat Cow, Lunarpages, and Hostgator. In the case of Lunarpages and Hostgator, my initial experiences were quite good. However, for one reason or another, the support at those places definitely declined in quality—at least for me.
Remember, while features and price are important when searching for web hosting, always consider support as well. Sooner or later, we’ll need to contact our web host for some help. When that time comes, we expect to get solutions and not excuses or upsells.
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