Reseller Hosting - The Importance of Toll Free Phone Support

Have you ever found yourself unable to receive your email or bring up your website at 1 am on a Sunday morning and your only recourse is to submit a support ticket to your host and wait up to 24 hours for a reply? Is that any way to run a business? What if you've signed up for a reseller hosting plan with this host?

Can your customers really afford to wait? Yet, that is the way a great many web hosting businesses function these days, as it has become an unfortunate but acceptable way of doing business in the web hosting industry.

In order to cut costs, many web hosting companies rely only on some type of web based ticketing or email based support system. Don't get me wrong, these types of web based and email based technical support tracking systems are essential and in many cases a preferred method of providing technical support to a web hosting customer.

Sometimes a web hosting customer will have a login/password issue, need some help with a piece of code or have some other issue that requires actual text be sent back and forth between the client and the tech. In other cases, the issue at hand may simply not be that urgent and the customer does not require the immediacy that phone support can bring. Without a doubt, every serious web hosting company must have some type of web and/or email based ticketing system to serve their customers.

But let's get back to 1 am on Sunday morning again. Let's say like many web designers, coders and programmers, you like to work late into the night and that's the time you finally have to sit down and bang out some much needed work on your new site. You make yourself a cup of coffee and fire up your browser only to see some dreaded error, telling you your site is unreachable.

What do you do now? Sure, you can go ahead and submit a support ticket to your host and hope that someone will beat their 24 hour response time guarantee, but there you are dead in the water and at the mercy of some queue based ticketing system. Your hopes of a productive evening are out the window.

Here's another example. What if one of your customers is suddenly experiencing some strange intermittent database issue that you can't diagnose yourself and you need to get in contact with your host. You send a ticket in describing the issue as best you can and even in a best case scenario with a hosting company that guarantees a ticket response time in under an hour, you get a reply from the tech asking you for your client's IP. You send that in, wait another 45 minutes to an hour before receiving another reply from the tech informing you that the ip is not being blocked, how about performing a traceroute and sending that in now? You see where this is going. Many frustrating hours of back and forth with a tech support agent before your relatively simple issue is finally resolved.

Now imagine that same scenario, but in this case, you can contact your hosting company's tech support department through a toll free 800 number, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You pick up the phone and dial the tech and within 5 minutes the issue is resolved, you are back in action and your client is happy. Or that 1AM Sunday morning coding session can start anew in a matter of minutes. It's really a no brainer.

While every hosting company must have some type of web based ticketing system to serve their customers and resellers, 24x7 toll free telephone technical support is a crucial resource for anyone who is serious about web hosting and in particular, reseller hosting. If you are a reseller and your clients rely on you for their online businesses, then toll free phone support is absolutely essential.

Rich Brodsky, owner of 1Host Web Hosting, since 1996, provides reseller hosting packages with toll free phone tech support 24 hours a day. For a limited time, select packages include a Free Enom account, Free WHMCS billing software and absolutely no setup fees.