How to Check the Customer Support of a Webhost before You Pay Anything

webhost customer careJust because WordPress has made it incredibly easier to launch your own blog, it doesn’t mean that you are absolved of “doing your homework” when you are about to start a blog. WordPress is merely a content management system that will take care of everything which is on site, but it will not be able to help you while dealing with the offsite problems (e.g. database error).

When you are about to launch your own blog or small business website, you need to chew over many different factors, because one step in the wrong direction can cause serious damages to your business reputation and credibility. Choosing a web host is one of those steps. When choosing a company that will be hosting your business website on its servers, you must do the due diligence, instead of just going for the first one that you stumble across while searching at Google. Usually people base their decisions on the factors like rates, features, and the space or bandwidth, but there’s one thing that is a lot more important than all of these factors combined, and that is … customer support.

Remember that you might not regret signing up with a host that charges you a couple more dollars than the average market price, but having a poor customer support will surely make you regret sooner than later. Therefore, you must try the following tips to ascertain the quality of the customer support even before you pay a single penny.

Try the Live Chat:

The first thing that you should be looking for is the icon of live chat support at their homepage. Some companies will just put up the icon while it keeps showing the offline message all the time, needless to say that a live chat support which is unavailable for the most part of the day is good for nothing. At the very least, live chat support should be available during the working hours, but don’t just stop at the availability. Go ahead and have some chatter with the customer support representative sitting on the other end. Ask a couple of questions about their prices, features, or if they are offering any kind of discounts, and see if they are helpful and patient enough in their response.

Submit a Ticket:

Live support is good for simple queries, but in the case of technical glitches or errors, the live chat guy will be directing you to submit a support ticket with the details, which is the standard support system at the majority of hosting companies. A good hosting company must respond to your support ticket within 24 hours (the good ones tend to respond much sooner than that). If you are not getting the response within 24 hours of submitting the ticket, then you should try another host. Imagine your business website or blog going off the radar and you can’t do anything but wait for a response while your site or online store stays offline … that would be catastrophic for your credibility and repute as an online business.

Forum:

Some hosting companies have forums or message boards where you can look around for the answers for common queries before submitting a query. If there’s a forum like that, you should take a look at the type of threads and the responses from staff. If there are too many threads made by the customers, who sound irked over the downtime or any other problem, then probably the host is not worth your investment. Similarly, if there are some valid queries waiting for the answers, you should be leaving instantaneously.

Posing Technical Questions:

You might think that you can launch and take care of a website, after going through some online tutorials on how to install or use WordPress, but no matter how easy WordPress or any other CMS becomes, you might be facing some technical glitch or bug every once in a while. Therefore your technical support guys should be capable and ready to assist you with all these matters. It is better to raise some technical questions even before you purchase a hosting package and see how detailed is the response.

Quality of the Response:

While submitting your queries via live chat support, ticket system, or a simple email, pore over the quality and preciseness of the answers that you’ve got. If all you are getting is some readymade template, or they are directing you to a page with nothing but heaps of text, then the customer support is not good enough, because a good web hosts will reply with a to-the-point answer more often than not.

Bio:

Apart from these tips, Farah often writes about web hosting services like yahoo or midphase at her blog. You can visit her blog and make the most of discounts featured at her website. The web hosting reviews and coupon codes will help you choose the best web hosting services and save big while purchasing a hosting package.