Since our last comparison study of web hosting live chat support response times, live chat has continued to grow in popularity—so much so, that it is now very rare for a web host not to offer it as a means of customer support. Unfortunately, there are still some hosting companies that only offer live chat at certain times of the day. For that reason, we left GoDaddy and Media Temple off our survey this year as their intermittent live chat availability is definitely disappointing. However, they are definitely the exception to the rule, as live chat support is now frequently used proactively by web hosting companies as you visit their website.
One negative result from the increased popularity of live chat support is that wait times during the daytime are sometimes longer these days. Fortunately, a lot of the web hosting companies we tested still provide fast response times. In that vein, we found that most of the hosting companies have remained consistent in their live chat performance. That is, the faster responding web hosts in the past remain the better performers this year, and the ones with slower response times in the past remain at the bottom of our list.
Live Chat Support Response Times
Because live chat response times can vary greatly, we tried to get the most accurate results by testing at multiple times of the day and night. The numbers below give the best representation of our experience with each web host as we averaged out our wait times during the morning, afternoon, and night.
InMotion Hosting – 8.4 Sec.
SiteGround – 14.5 Sec.
IX Web Hosting – 16.2 Sec.
WP Engine – 17.2 Sec.
Lunarpages – 19.7 Sec.
Namecheap – 21 Sec.
A2 Hosting – 30.9 Sec.
GreenGeeks – 31.7 Sec.
InterServer – 32.7 Sec.
iPage – 33.3 Sec.
MyHosting.com – 57.7 Sec.
Bluehost – 1 Min. 58 Sec.
HostGator – 7 Min. 24 Sec.
Arvixe – 13 Min. 6 Sec.
Kudos to InMotion Hosting, SiteGround, IX Web Hosting, and WP Engine for placing at the top of our live chat support testing results for 2016.
