How confident are you in your web hosting provider’s support system? Do you feel as though the services they provide are enough to fulfill your needs, or do you think that they’ve got room for improvement? Knowing what types of problems your hosting company is able to solve quickly and effectively should be an essential part of why you chose to do business with them in the first place. Let’s look at an example of what happens when a web hosting company’s support team fails to do their job correctly and a customer is unfit to handle the situation.

Mark logs into his server and notices something unusual. It seems that the MySQL server is not responding. Mark is a distributor for a major corporation and his SQL databases store his customer’s information, orders, and various notes of payment processing. His hosting provider has 4 methods of communication: e-mail, live chat, live phone support, and a community forum. As he can’t even tell what needs to be shipped out anymore, he contacts tech support via phone in hopes of talking to someone ASAP.

Ten minutes after calling and waiting for an available representative, he introduces himself and kindly explains to the tech support employee his situation. The tech support employee queries the server, and finds that it is offline for the next few hours in order to fix a potential security hole. Mark asks what he can do to to get his site running in the meantime, and the representative insists that he wait for it to become available. He hangs up the phone.

Two hours pass by, and Mark is growing inpatient. He needs to know what orders to be shipped out as the post office is closing soon. He’s also aware that his system is unable to process any new orders that may have been made during the day. By this time, he’s posted a message on his website and e-mailed all his customers that their shipments may be delayed due to server trouble. He calls tech support again, and this time is connected to a different person.

By now Mark isn’t in the greatest of moods, and insists that there must be some way to resolve the issue. The tech support worker is ending his shift and has already dealt with a lot of angry customers that day for the same issue. He decides not to inform Mark that he can transfer his data to a working server because he’ll probably just call back later and someone else will do it.

As you could imagine, Mark would have had a pretty bad day. But it didn’t have to turn out so badly. Remember, Mark had 4 different methods of getting support. He only used 1 of them, and even though it was the most reliable of choices, it failed. An e-mail to the support team would have probably been responded too late though, and the live chat system might not have turned out any better of a result than the telephone crew did. But if he were to check the hosting provider’s forum, he may have noticed complaints from other customers that the same server was down for the day, and read about how some of them transferred their data to another server.

The lesson that should be learned here is that no amount of communication, whether it be direct or indirect, can be too great when it’s the lifeline of your business. Make sure that there’s more than one way to get a hold of help, and that you know how to do it when the time comes.