ENSURING YOUR HOST OFFERS DECENT TECHNICAL SUPPORT

It’s the role of any reliable hosting firm to take full responsibility for its hardware, software and operating environment so that webmasters can focus solely upon running their business.

If a hosting company is truly committed to this objective, their technical support must be stellar. Customer care therefore is always a major consideration before you chose a Web host.

Since it is a major loss leader, many hosting firms don’t invest in the labor and equipment required to maintain their operation. It is thus the task of wise webmasters to size up the expertise of a hosting company’s support staff before making the fateful decision concerning where to host their Web sites.

Determining whether technical support is dependable is important, because if anything goes wrong with your site, who are you going to call? In an ideal world, it would be your knowledgeable customer care representative. However, in the real world, we know that knowledgeable customer care is hard to find.

Hosting companies claim that they have technicians working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year in their operation centers maintaining mission-critical systems. While this in fact may be true, the most unqualified people in the hosting industry sometimes work in support call centers. Due to the unprecedented demand for IT professionals, many Web hosts can’t find employees that are formally trained in Operating System and network technology. Other firms allot so much money to advertising and marketing that technical support becomes a secondary priority. In both instances, customers suffer because they cannot access immediate or useful assistance. So before you select a host, make sure that you put their support to the test.

First, call up technical support and ask them to walk you through the basic routines needed to maintain your site. Ask the technical support technician whether he or she is available at the office at regular intervals. Ask the technician whether he or she went through a corporate or professional training program in order to qualify for the job. If the technician is assisting you with a Windows NT-based request, make sure to ask whether he or she has a MCSC, or Microsoft certification. Ask the support technician how long he or she has been working with the company.

Determine whether technicians are knowledgeable by listening and assessing their tone of voice. Do technicians at a certain company put you on hold often? Then they may only be employed to answer telephones or e-mail and relay support requests to someone more qualified. Also ask support technicians basic questions about where the company is located, where they are located and the company’s address. This might give you an indication if a hosting company’s support services are outsourced, or whether support representatives are working out of the firm’s server farm or head office. Ask the support representative outright whether he or she is employed on a contractual basis. Also determine how sophisticated customer tracking and billing is by asking the technician to pull information about your account.

This will give you an indication whether the company has automated systems to track technical inquiries. Further, ask the technician whether the firm provides an online “knowledge base” or “technical support center.” If the company does, make sure to inspect its support documentation to determine whether it is specific to the service.

Many hosting companies now offer technical support documentation in hard copy format. You should attempt to determine whether the hosting firm will allow you to download a PDF file with all of its documentation enclosed.

A prospective Web hosting customer should also determine whether a hosting company offers true 24-hour support by e-mailing or calling the hosting provider after hours.

These tests will give you a strong indication whether the technical support is reliable or questionable. Remember that you’ll have to trust any host you select to deliver timely and useful support on issues that can affect your income.

5 Tips When Choosing Multiple Domain Hosting

If you have or are planning to have several domains running on the web, then you should consider getting a multiple domain hosting. Multiple domain hosting allows you to host several domains under a single hosting plan. Most web hosting companies call it shared hosting.

The main advantage of multiple domain hosting is it helps to consolidate all your domains under one hosting plan. It makes domain management a breeze. It also makes it easier to modify any settings since you are doing it from the same control panel.

Here are a few tips you might want to bear in mind when looking a shared hosting service.

Hard Disk Space

Nowadays most shared web hosting plans provide more than enough disk space to satisfy your needs. It is important you know before hand how much disk space your web site will be using not just currently but projected 6 months, 1 year and 2 years down the road.

Some web applications requires more disk space than others. One example are file hosting sites. Also remember to check the cost of upgrading your disk space in case you need one. Most web hosting providers charge on a per GB basis.

Bandwidth

Most web hosting providers cap a limit on each hosting plan’s bandwidth. Check to make sure it provides sufficient bandwidth for your current websites and also room for growth. Most web hosting providers will charge you on a per GB basis for exceeded bandwidth.

The speed is also important for websites. No one wants to visit a website that loads slowly. File hosting and video sites for example requires an acceptable speed in order to deliver file download or streaming video.

Number of Domains Allowed

Some web hosting limit the number of domains for each hosting plan. It is best to get one with unlimited domains so you have to worry about the limit.

Emails/FTP accounts

You probably will need separate email accounts for each domain you have. Most web hosting services provide webbased or as well outlook based email accounts. Preferably try to get one that has unlimited email/ftp accounts.

Ease of control panel

With many domains, emails, ftp accounts etc to manage, it is important that the control panel is easy to use and all information can be accessed easily. Most web hosting services provide cpanel. Some web hosting services do use their own customised control panel. A good example is godaddy.

Whichever control panel you are using, familiarize yourself with the interface and get used to it as fast as possible.

What is Virtualization?

As some of you know, Rackspace just launched our new virtualization product. It’s been in the works for a while and we’re proud of what we’ve put together. I’m also sure a lot of you are familiar with virtualization technology and how it works. However, just as many of you may be wondering how you can benefit from it.

Reference.com defines virtualization as “the abstraction of computer resources” or “a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computer resources from the way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with those resources.” So what exactly does all of that mean?

Virtualization allows you to carve up a physical server into individual operating system (OS) instances or Virtual Machines (VMs). VMs can run a variety of different types of OSs on a physical server, all operating individually and securely from one another. How many VMs can you put on one server? That depends mostly on your hardware and the resources your VMs require. As servers become more powerful and cores per processor increase, a lot of applications just don’t make use of those extra resources. Virtualization can give you the ability to make better use of those resources and reduce the number of servers you deploy, which eases system administration and can be more cost effective.

Usually you’ll see two common types of virtualization implementations. The first one is called a Hypervisor. A Hypervisor is essentially the OS layer of the machine that enables virtualization. It’s typically a very small footprint, allowing for better performance and more available resources for the physical machine.

The other type of virtualization implementation is application based. In this case, the virtualization software installs on top of a running OS. This usually reduces the amount of features available, in addition to reducing performance and allowing fewer resources dedicated to VMs.

A lot of the larger players in the game are developing their virtualization software to go the Hypervisor route. VMware’s ESX, also known as VI3, is one of the dominant players when it comes to Hypervisor based virtualization. They’ve been one of the leaders in virtualization for a while and have a very large feature set when compared to Xen or Microsoft’s Hyper-V, which is unreleased at this time.

Some key virtualization features:
Legacy Operating System Support (varies by Hypervisor): Virtualization abstracts the hardware and usually uses very common virtual hardware; therefore, older legacy OSs are able to function without issue in a virtual environment. This is useful for companies with older applications that only support certain legacy operating systems.
VM OS Provisioning: Since the environment is virtualized, deployment of new OS VMs happens quickly. Once a base Hypervisor is in place, VMs can be provisioned quickly since a new physical server does not have to be assembled, and prepped for the Datacenter.
Templates and Clones: Templates allow you to capture the state of a VM so you can redeploy a new VM later, maintaining the same configuration and software. Clones allow you to make a complete copy of the VM in case you ever need to revert back to that original copy.
Snapshots: Allow you to take a picture of a VM at a point in time and revert back to that time point if you chose. This is useful for testing/development, deploying patches, upgrading applications, and trying something new. If something goes wrong, you simply revert back to the previous snapshot and the machine is back to its original state.
Live Migrations: With shared storage, many virtualization technologies allow you to live migrate a VM from one system to another while the VM is still running. This is useful for performing upgrades or repairs to physical servers without any downtime. For example, if you had two physical servers running three VMs per server, you would need to do maintenance on one of the servers without any downtime. A live migration (also known as Vmotion to VMware users) allows you to shift the VMs off the server that is going down for maintenance while they are still running and serving connections. Once your maintenance is complete, you can shift them back to the original physical server.

Why there are different web hosting prices for the same package?

Web host reseller is a business that buys server space at a discounted price from a higher-tier Web host and then resells it to its own clients.

Usually a reseller is an independent contractor who buys Web space from a “reseller hosting service provider” in order to sell that same space, sometimes in smaller increments, to businesses and individuals for a substantial profit. The reseller often enhances the value of Web hosting services by offering special expertise on top of raw Internet presence provision.

Typically, the reseller adds continuity to the Web host industry’s supply chain by servicing end-users, who are usually small business consumers. Resellers therefore fulfill the role of “middle men” by extending the revenues and reach of higher-tier Web hosts.

Higher-tier Web hosts benefit from resellers because they essentially mass and niche market their products and services. The reseller can then mark-up the cost of these products and service to make considerable profit.

Most resellers are second-tier hosting companies, Internet service providers, Web designers, publishers, domain registrars, or individuals who wish to capitalize on the expanding market for enterprise-class Internet services.

Resellers such as these prove that physically maintaining a rack of Internet servers is not required to be successful at providing Web hosting services. Indeed, the fact that they do not maintain infrastructure means that resellers can provide additional value-added services to their clients due to cost-efficiencies. For this reason, the majority of Web host resellers are either Web developers or system integrators who provide e-business solutions to their customers. Typically, their customers want “integrated solutions,” which include Internet connectivity as a central component. Since their customers contract them for their expertise, Web developers and system integrators are usually granted the responsibility to provide hosting to ensure compatibility with the solutions that are deploying.

Consumers also select resellers because most specialize in customer relationship management. Indeed, the emergence of many second-tier Web hosts in the late 1990s can be attributed to the growing need amongst consumers to locate a hosting provider that can provide them with enhanced customer care. While many higher-tier hosts do provide technical support, the volume of their client base prohibits them from offering extremely personalized care, especially if the consumer is new to the purchase of Web hosting services. It is here where Web hosting resellers add value, by offering their customers a higher level of technical support.

Resellers are able to enhance customer care through offering more personable service and by leveraging their human resources to create more in-depth, customized documentation for their clientele. By so doing, resellers have endeared themselves to a large number of small to mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) who purchase Web hosting services.

Many industry participants estimate that approximately 65 per cent of the client base of a typical higher-tier SME Web host is provided through resellers. Resellers therefore are a tightly integrated component of the overall SME segment of the Web host industry. And with the Web hosting industry still projecting rapid growth within the next three years, it is widely expected that the reseller Web hosting segment will continue to grow with enormous magnitude. For this reason, many in the industry perceive reselling as a continuing opportunity to build solid business partnerships that can provide substantial levels of incoming revenue.

Free Hosting

Free hosting – is it charity?

“Free hosting” is most of the time offered in exchange for placing advertisements on your website, meaning that the host will automatically place an advertisement at the top and sometimes at the bottom of every page of your website. Sometimes they don’t use banners they use pop-ups.

No matter what they ask you to do in exchange for free hosting, you have to do something in exchange, so you’re not being offered free hosting! They give you hosting in exchange for placing ads on your website. They call it free because you don’t give them any money, but you do pay for it.

They claim and even convince you that they’re doing you a favor: they give you free hosting. They know that if you think the service is free you’ll not complain for downtime, unresponsive support teams. But you’re not getting it for free! Now, even if they would offer it for free, the service should be at least acceptable. But it usually isn’t.

Now, even if they would offer it for free, the service should be at least acceptable. But it usually isn’t. If one offers free lunch for the poor, that food must not be rotten. It’s just common sense!

What these free hosting services always seem to forget to mention is the fact that they’re not charities. They’re businesses and they’re always looking for ways to make a profit.

I find it deceiving that they use the word “free” when the right name for it should be “barter hosting” or “trade hosting” or “ad-funded hosting”. But, as strange as it might sound, the world doesn’t revolve around me , so the so called free hosting will remain “free hosting”. Too many people in the hosting industry use this term and too many regular people look for “free hosting” for it to go away.

Common problems with free hosting

It should not be a surprise that free hosting is not as good as paid hosting. The problems that are common in the paid hosting section of the hosting industry are almost a rule in the world of free hosting. Timely is almost out of the question with most free hosts. Excessive downtime and slow servers are almost the norm rather than just common problems.

That isn’t to say that free web hosting can’t be acceptable in terms of quality. There are some companies that offer reliable free web hosting. Don’t get it wrong, reliable here doesn’t mean paid-hosting-reliable, it means reliable according to the free hosting standards (whatever that means).
Free hosting without the ads

Yes, you can find free hosting that doesn’t require the placement of ads on your pages. That doesn’t mean the company isn’t there to make a profit! The free account will give you only a small amount of bandwidth and space. What the hosting company does is give you free hosting while you’re starting your website/business and/or your needs are low.

They figure (bet) that you’ll go for their paid version (most free hosts have paid plans too), as soon as your website will outgrow its account in terms of bandwidth and/or space.

Some free hosts allow only the use of sub-domains or directories, which means that your website’s URL will look something like this: yourwebsite.yourhost.com or www.yourhost.com/yourwebsite. That means that if you move your website you’ll lose all those hard earned links that point at it, people will send you emails that you’ll never read etc. You are stuck with that host!

What’s in it for the host in this case? Well, the host gets brand awareness because it gets to be published in the countless of free hosting directories. Also it gets its name in your URL and in the URL of lots of other websites. Branding again! Also, if the service is at least acceptable it will get a good reputation, which often is worth more than pure gold. All those ultimately mean more business for their business.

It happened and it still does, that some hosts start their business with a great “free hosting” offer. Their name soon gets published all over the Internet. After a while (usually a year or more) the company stops offering free hosting. Some of their “free” clients will agree to become paying customers, while others will decide to see their work vanish into oblivion, but not pay. By that time though, the host gains immense brand awareness. It might also get quite a few clients as soon as they turn into a paid host because of those clients that were hosted for free and decide to pay to keep their websites up and running.

Unlimited bandwidth/space?

Unlimited space/hosting are a no-no in the paid hosting arena. In the free hosting arena it’s even worse. It basically spells out that the servers will be overcrowded. Although you might like the idea of having as much space and data transfer as you need, please resist the temptation. Unlimited space/bandwidth is an illusion. It’s like when you’re seeing water in the middle of the desert. A mirage. You are promised, but you will not receive.

Secret backdoor to quality free hosting

Actually it’s not that secret, just not widely known. As I said in the beginning of this article, free hosting is most of the time nothing more than a barter.

Now here’s the idea: why settle for lousy “free hosting” when you can barter for quality hosting instead? All you need to do is find a few good paid hosting companies and then ask for hosting in exchange for placing ads on your website.

Your greatest advantage is that you’ll be able to make those ads fit your website perfectly. They will not be automatically added to your pages at the top or bottom. You’ll have complete control over your website’s design.

Sure, you’ll have to negotiate where to place those ads. It’s normal for the host to ask for the ads to be placed so that they’ll get high chances to be noticed by your website’s visitors. As long as they don’t ask for a big banner to be placed on your pages I don’t see a serious problem. I would suggest you though to go for a text ad. It’s usually much easier to make a text ad blend-in nicely so that it doesn’t scream “I’m an ad!”.

This solution for getting great hosting without giving money out of your pocket is not for all websites though. First, the hosting company will want a suited audience. Targeting the right audience will bring them the best results in terms of sales volume.

So your website’s audience should have a rather high interest in buying hosting. Web programmers, web designers, webmasters, search engine optimization specialists and web business owners are among those who might be interested in hosting offers. If your website attracts such people, you have significantly better chances to trade ads in exchange for hosting.

One thing to notice is that your chances to barter for hosting are considerably smaller if you’re just launching your website. That’s because you can’t get something for nothing. If you offer advertising and have no audience you’re basically offering potential audience and ask for hosting in exchange. The only chance you’ve got is to convince the host that your site has great potential. That you have a good plan to get visitors.

You might think that if it’s just starting your website will not consume lots of resources. After all, the activity is near zero. However there is more to hosting than just that. You will need some support, which costs the host quite a lot.

One thing to notice is that hosts will prefer to barter hosting with text based websites. Websites offering big files for download are not likely to be accepted.
Conclusions

Free hosting is not free – at least in the form in which it exists on the internet today. I have yet to find a free host that is a real charity. As strange as it might sound, look out for free hosts that seem to be completely free (charity-like). A host must have funding! Ask them how do they cover or plan to cover their costs. Is there a foundation behind that host? It’s highly unlikely, but who knows!

All hosts have to pay for the servers, bandwidth and staff. If they don’t have a good plan to cover the costs, the future for them is grim and services will soon degrade due to under funding.

The best option if you don’t want to spend money for hosting is to barter for it with a respected, serious, honest web host. But don’t ever trick yourself into thinking that you’re getting something for nothing. Ads are a form of payment so you’re paying.

Web Hosting Article: Shared or Dedicated – Which should you choose?

Before you begin your search for a web host you should first determine whether you need shared web hosting or dedicated web hosting.

A shared web hosting account is an account on a web server that hosts other shared accounts. The number of accounts on one shared server can vary widely; some servers host a few hundred, while others have thousands of sites hosted on one server. Hosting your website on a shared server is a workable solution for many small businesses, as shared web hosting accounts are priced much lower than dedicated servers. Shared web hosting accounts have limited access to the core administrative functions of the server. Most web hosting companies offer comprehensive technical support for users of shared hosting plans. Complete technical support is usually included in the price of your account plan.

A dedicated server is usually dedicated to one, or just a few websites, usually for the sole use by one company. The cost of a dedicated server is higher than that of a shared hosting account. With a dedicated server, you have access to the core administrative functions of the server. With most dedicated server plans offered by hosting companies, you’re pretty much on your own where technical support is concerned. If you don’t have an IT staff or a server administrator to provide support, you may want to find a person to help you manage your dedicated server. Many hosting companies that offer dedicated server plans also offer “per issue” support, meaning that you’ll pay a certain amount, usually an hourly fee, for technical support issues. Some dedicated server plans have optional “support tickets” that you can purchase in advance.

Another option is what’s called a “managed dedicated hosting” plan. With a managed dedicated plan, you get a dedicated server and the hosting company also provides comprehensive support like you usually find in a shared hosting plan. This is a good alternative for companies that don’t have an IT staff or a server administrator and don’t want to get involved at all in the technical aspects of running a server. The price for a managed dedicated server is usually higher than for an unmanaged dedicated server plan as you’re getting technical support included.
Whatever type of web hosting plan you choose, make sure that the plan you’ve chosen fits your needs.

Cheap Web Hosting

Most people are ecstatic when they get a good deal, like a dirt-cheap web host who offers too much for next to nothing. In actual fact instead of joy, this kind of deal should send alarm bells ringing loudly in your head and here’s why. Two Dirt Cheap Web Hosting Possibilities: When your hosting deal is just too good to be true, more often than not one of two things has happened both of which are not good for you. Either the web host is overselling hosting resources, which means that you will inevitably end up with lousy services and a site that loads at snail pace and many times is not even accessible at all. In other words, the cheap will end up being so expensive that it will clearly be unaffordable to you in terms of lost clients and revenue because people cannot access your site most of the time. The second reason could be that the web hosting business is out to try and grab as many clients as possible collecting the maximum amount of revenue in advance and then filing for bankruptcy. This has happened many times and naturally chances are that you will never see a refund. This is the only road such a business strategy will end up on. Many have had the idea of using a business model where they go out for as much market share as they possibly can at a price that is below cost with the intention of raising prices later. In reality this will hardly work in an industry that is as competitive as web hosting is. Hosts Who Oversell Resources: Overselling refers to the situation where a host goes out for more clients than what their available resources can support. Webmasters usually sign up like crazy and at the beginning when the resources are yet to be stretched all looks well and happy webmasters refer the cheap service to others and the result is that the client base grows at blinding speed. What follows after that is disaster as suddenly users find that their sites take too long to load and inevitably they lose many hits in this way, because impatient prospective visitors just click their way out of the site that is taking ages to load and end up going elsewhere. Downtimes also become so frequent that your site ends up not loading at all most of the times. The result is a classic illustration of why cheaper can often end up being much more expensive. Hosting Business Model From Hell: An increasing number of new web hosts have been offering increasingly more bandwidth for less. This has really not caused concern because most people have heard that the prices of resources used in web hosting have been dropping in price in recent times. However the truth is that some hosting rates have been dropping much faster while offering virtually unlimited bandwidth and resources. There is no such word as ‘unlimited’ in business because somebody has to pay the bills. The whole idea here is to secure as many hosting clients as possible and then raise prices in future. Or in some cases declare bankruptcy. Both options will leave you, the hosting client in big trouble. In Conclusion: This article has clearly shown some of the reasons why you need to get very nervous when the hosting deal is too good to be true because even when everything appears to be alright at the beginning, you may well have signed up for a disaster that is waiting to happen.

Bandwidth or Data Transfer – Which is Which?

Too often web hosts talk about bandwidth and data transfer in the same breath but truth is known they are different although very closely related. Bandwidth is how much data can be transferred at a time and data transfer is how much data is being transferred.

Think of it this way. If bandwidth were a bridge, then the bigger the bridge is the more vehicles can pass through it. While data transfer is the number of vehicles allowed on the bridge in say a month. In essence, data transfer is the consumption of bandwidth.
How It Affects Your Site

The less bandwidth you have, the slower your site takes to load regardless of the visitor’s connection type. If you have more visitors, some of them will have to wait their turn. The least data transfer you have, the more often you’ll find your site unavailable because you’re reached the maximum allowed until a new month rolls by or you upgrade your account.
Determining Your Requirements

Usually when a host talks about bandwidth, they are referring to your transfer. So you need to figure out what is sufficient for your site to function. You’ll need to gather some information; fairly easy if you already have a site. Most of this information is available from your traffic history. If you don’t have an existing site, provide an optimistic estimate if you intend to heavily promote the site. Then get ready for some math.
Find out the daily averages of:

Number of visitors / expected number of visitors
Page size including the graphics of the page
Page views / expected pages viewed by each visitor

Then, multiply them as follows:

Visitors x Page size x Page views x 30 days = Monthly Website Transfer

You should also throw in a small margin or error there to take into account email traffic and your own uploads to the server. If you offer downloads, then you should add the following:
Average/Expected downloads x File Size x 30 days = Monthly Download Transfer

Unlimited Plans

Bandwidth is very expensive. All hosts are limited by their own allocations. Thinking back to the bridge. What happens is each visitor to your site will be given a smaller lane to transfer the data, creating many tiny lanes therefore “unlimited”. The more visitors you have the smaller each lane will be which makes each visitor wait for the page to load.

More often than not there is little choice over your bandwidth as your host controls this. Some hosts may limit the number of simultaneous connections so in affect slowing down your site and refusing some visitors. This is called throttling. If you’re concerned about this, you should ask the host how they control bandwidth usage or purchase a package with more data transfer.
Reducing Transfers

On the other hand, you can reduce your transfer amount by building simpler, more efficient websites and optimizing your graphics. Refrain from fancy flash presentations or streaming audio. Use CSS, call JavaScript externally instead of embedding in every page. Remove unwanted tags, white space and comments. Limit your META tags to those absolutely necessary. Having too many keywords is not search engine friendly. Besides many search engines will only review the first few and ignore the rest.

Another good idea is to cache your website but you might want to set an expiry date in the HTTP headers so the browser will refresh the content after a certain time. Use mod-gzip. It could save you as much as 40% of your bandwidth. Out of control robots can also suck down your bandwidth like a black hole. So use robots.txt to keep spiders in check

Reliable Web Hosting..

Either you want to set up a new web site or you have a website that is doing quite well on the Internet and so far there have been no issues, and you are happy with the way things are going. But have you ever stopped to consider how reliable your existing or potential web host is? Here are a few key questions you can ask to figure out if your web host is reliable or not: How secure is the server on which your web site is hosted? Does it feature powerful firewalls – not the free versions that are available on the Internet – and strong anti-virus software? Or, is the server chock-a-block with worms and Trojans and hackers are regularly fingering into the server ports? Of course, you cannot figure this out on your own if you aren’t a technical person, and the best way to find this out would be to read reviews about your web host and speak to his other clients. How powerful is the server hardware? If your website is hosted on a server backed by obsolete hardware, which is networked with an antiquated broadband connection, then you’ve had it. Remember, the computer today is converging with TV and video and the hardware has to be powerful enough not just to support huge multimedia files, but also to ensure that these multimedia files are easily downloaded by the website visitors. What is the server uptime? Does your web host’s server work on crutches or does it hum along perfectly? If you are getting a server downtime of 5% and over because your web host keeps rebooting his beautiful system, then it’s time to get a new web host. What’s the customer support like? Does your web host feature 24/7 customer support staff or is your host a reseller? If he’s a reseller, he will not be as dedicated as you would like him to be; or, even if he isn’t a reseller and doesn’t have 24/7 customer support, then he is not reliable. Does your web host take backups? All reliable web hosts always back up the data on their server just in case anything goes wrong. And this is a very important feature, which users do not bother to enquire when they rent the space. Does your server have SSL? If you’re planning to set up a shop then no customer will ever swipe his credit card on your site unless your website has a SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). Ensure that your web host provides you with this feature before you sign up with him. Is the host server easy to use? Once you upload your website, you will need to change it frequently and for that to happen you need to have access to a control panel that’s easy to use. Plus, you will also want to plug in automated scripts such as blogs, chat rooms, content management system, etc. on your website. Make sure your web host’s control panel is easy to use and that you are given many automated scripts to use. These are the basic questions every reliable web host should be able to answer favorably. Also, do not stop after asking these questions – get your technical guy to ask about telnet access, error pages and all that jazzed out jargon, which technical guys yak all the time. Once you’re sure your web host is the cat’s whiskers – go ahead and hire space from him.

Simple Step Towards Improved Customer Satisfaction for Web Hosts

Let’s face it, there isn’t a web host out there who hasn’t experienced times where the server that their company web site is on has gone down. Sometimes only for a few minutes, but sometimes those minutes can turn into hours – or even days if a major piece of hardware has gone belly up on you. And in most cases, you don’t dedicate an entire server to your domain – you have customers who also share that server. Customers who now are not only unable to gain access to THEIR domain, but can not reach yours either. They are effectively cut off from electronic communication with you. So what do they do? How can they find out what is going on with their web site, and more importantly, when it will be back online?

Some hosts, like AlphaOne Technology, have emergency support available by telephone. In that case, (if they can remember the phone number since they can not access your website to find the number), they begin calling. And calling. And calling. Usually there are over 100-200 customers hosted on a single server. Do you or your staff really have the time to be fielding that many phone calls when you are in the middle of a crisis and need to devote your time to fixing the problem and getting the server operational? Probably not. Nor do your customers want to spend time on hold or dealing with busy signals. Every minute on hold, or every call that results in a busy signal, leaves a bad impression with that customer. They want to know WHY they are down and they want to know NOW.

If you are large enough to have multiple incoming lines & an automated voice mail system, a simple solution is to immediately record a server status alert, along with an honest assessment of what has happened and, if you know it, an estimated time that the server will be operational again. This will allow customers calling about their site being down to get the information they need without having to talk to a live technician. The customer is happy to be informed, (even if they are VERY unhappy about having their site down), and you have saved yourself time and money and can focus on the important problem at hand.

In your recorded status alert, let the customer know how often the status will be updated. We recommend that if a server is down longer than 90 minutes, updated information should be made available every 30-45 minutes.

If you are a smaller host with only one incoming line, you probably don’t have enough customers that busy signals will become a major irritant, but keep the message very short and to the point.

By now many of you are saying “what about those of us who don’t HAVE a tech support number to call?” Good question since a recent survey shows that over 75% of web hosting companies do NOT publish a tech support number. Fear not, there are a couple of other ways that we will discuss in upcoming articles. Our next article will talk about using Voice Over IP service and Instant Messaging.

This article may freely be reprinted on your web site or BLOG as long as all links and author information are not altered or disabled.