Better server performance or customer support?
When we evaluate a hosting service, there're two most important points – server performance and customer support. They're always considered the golden partner. But what if we can just get one? Which will you choose? It seems strange but the truth is it does happen often in hosting industry. We can't always get everything as expected. This article will provide you guides based editorial experience.
Server performance is absolutely the most important for hosting service. Once you put your site online, you always want to get fast and stable loading. But a fast server is not so easy to get unless you get a vps or full dedicated server. Because of the competitive business, most hosting providers trying to set very low price for their shared hosting service. But they still need to be profitable, they have no choice but to purchase outdated hardwares or simply oversell the server space. The result is hosting server will be more and more busy by heavy traffic
A high performance server always comes with high price. In order to provide leading uptime and loading speed, the hosting group will apply reliable hardware production and place it in reputable data center space. They also need to apply leading server monitoring system and keep it always online. The investment is not cheap at all.
Ideally, the leading performing hosting server should provide the same level support but it's not always working in the way. The simple logic is the server products already very expensive so hosting groups do not want to get more support staffs with extra investment. It's common to see a big hosting group with very few support staff. Our clients experienced such issue from A small orange hosting. ASO is a reputable hosting provider for its leading performance and rich feature plans. But you can't imagine how many people work there. One of our clients got website down and waited 1 day with no response in ticket. The ASO support finally responded and showed their carefulness. Their support leader also revealed they have very limited support technicians so couldn't respond so efficiently.
How do we think a hosting is offering quality support? Most of the time we judge from the support availability. For example if the company can always pick up your calls then most probably you'll be satisfied. However, you might have found most support in contact are sales representative and level 1 technicians. They are more professional in selling their service to you and redirecting to the next level people. Many hosting groups announce to provide 24*7 live support to show up their abilities in serving your requests. But they never mentions most front line support is for sales and only one or two tech professionals behind.
Don't think they're useless, at least they will let you calm down when you're upset with service problems. Especially when you have been tracking down an issue for long time, you feel much better if you can always keep in touch with support no matter if they can solve your problem in short time. Because at least you know someone is working on it but not ignoring their clients. As we see, a friendly and customer caring support is quite helpful to save your business. Especially when you like to convince your customer for recuring payment, customer support is playing an very important role. For those services with high rate second purchase, there're always powerful support teams behind. It might be easy to get an order but you have to work more hard in keeping the business for long.
Most of the time, we purchase a service not only because it meets all our technical requirements. On user end, there're simply too many options with similar features. What really makes their service different is on support features. No people can go with a best rated server without support. There's no such patience when their online business is put offline.