Reseller Hosting – Why your Web Host must provide Toll Free Phone Support

If you’re a web hosting reseller and you’ve ever had a flood of support requests from your clients at 1AM on a Sunday morning because a server is down, you know how awful that feeling is when you can’t reach your hosting company to resolve the issue. Your only recourse is to submit a support ticket and wait (sometimes up to 24 hours) for a response. Meanwhile your customers are growing angrier by the minute and there’s nothing you can do. Unfortunately, that’s the way a great many web hosting companies function as it has become an acceptable way of providing technical support to web hosting customers, even those who’ve signed up for reseller hosting plans.

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.

In some cases, a client may simply need a password reminder or need help with a piece of code that’s best served by sending actual text to the client. Also there are some cases where the support request is simply not that urgent and the client can afford to wait up to 24 hours for a reply.

But let’s take a look at that 1AM Sunday morning crisis again. You’re just about ready to shut down for the night, when your email box becomes filled with panicked cries of help from your clients, telling you they can’t bring up their sites or get their email.

What can you do now? You can submit a ticket to your hosting company’s help desk and just hope that someone will see it and jump on it right away, but you’re basically operating blindly, dead in the water and at the mercy of some web based ticket queue. It’s not going to be a fun night.

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.

Imagine now, the same scenario, but instead of using the ticketing system, you can just pick up the phone at any time of the day or night and reach your hosting company’s tech support department via a toll free 800 number. Within a matter of minutes, you’ve explained the situation in detail to the tech and he has offered a solution. Your customer is back in business and you can get on with your life. It’s a beautiful thing.

While every hosting company must have some type of web based ticketing system to serve their customers and resellers, 24×7 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.