I just decided to write these tips, in hope of maybe a few hosts might take a little or a lot and implement it with their plan. After being screwed by one host I know a lot more about it, and know what to look for, so here they are, from a client.

1. Fast response - ALWAYS provide fast response via email or support desk to customers and just non-customers asking questions. Even better is live support that is avaliable most of the time, including Java chats, MSN/AIM/etc messengers.

2. Provide a solution - Provide a phone number (weather its your cell, the datacenter's number, or even a pager) where clients can reach you ALL of the time, day or night, regarding the server being down/broken. Try to answer the phone as much as possible, don't have that attitude where you say "Oh, i'll let the machiene get it" Heck, for all you know this could be a potiental customer wanting a custom (Expensive ;) ) deal. If you are not there to answer in live person, or if its a pager, return the call ASAP, don't let it just sit on your voicemail. Lastly, if its possible have a way for people to directly get to datacenter workers. (Like if they carry pagers, give out the number...)

3. Hide NOTHING - People hate it when there is downtime, and they don't get any type of reason or email regarding it. This makes people feel like you are hiding something from them. Shouldn't they have a right to know if their server is down? I think so. Don't take a "Don't ask don't tell" policy. Even if no one notices the downtime, its important to keep them informed, once again its the trust thing. And don't forget to give a detailed description of why it went down, what you did to fix it, and preventing this from happening again.

4. Offer a refund for downtime - I know that a lot of hosts will just scroll this part and not do anything, but this is a great way to attract clients. A certain host has a policy of after 24 seconds of downtime they start refunding your money, 5% of what you paid per month every 30 minutes the server is down. It goes up to 100%. Although, they have it so YOU have to notice the downtime and report it with evidence. But that still makes it a good policy, even better would be to refund the money automaticly, once again its the trust thing. Once again this is a great way to attract people, and pats on the back to hosts who read this. :) It shows YOU are confident in your own datacenter with a policy such as this.

5. Be flexible - Make the best effort to fit to people's needs. If you can't, then offer something close to them. :)

Thank you for this - Very informative indeed.

Highly appreciated.

Yes, thanks for the insight!

Yeap thanks, it is good to look at things in the perspective of clients once in a while. Keep us on the ground.

Thanks a ton man!
I'm always asking people for feedback, no matter what it is I'm doing, but I seldom get it.. it's weird...

Thanks Again!

Good feedback, always good to get these out to newcomers looking at ways to establish their businesses, great points.

good points, makes sense too

Good feedback for sure. But I think this is for very special target market. I think many hosting clients starting up, they look at the price tag first and then think about the rest of the items you've mentioned.

Originally posted by FSFOX
3. Hide NOTHING - People hate it when there is downtime, and they don't get any type of reason or email regarding it. This makes people feel like you are hiding something from them. Shouldn't they have a right to know if their server is down? I think so. Don't take a "Don't ask don't tell" policy. Even if no one notices the downtime, its important to keep them informed, once again its the trust thing. And don't forget to give a detailed description of why it went down, what you did to fix it, and preventing this from happening again.


I was wondering if that is important to people other than me. When I was using other companies I always wanted to know and most often was never informed. Thanks for that advice.

A tip for customers:

1 - If it's too good to be true it usually is.

2 - Don't expect the same sort of service if your paying $1 as opposed to $10/mth

Great comments, I shall implement all that =)

Joshua

Thank you for your tips that is definitely some food for thought.:)

Thanks for the tips

Originally posted by FSFOX
3. Hide NOTHING - People hate it when there is downtime, and they don't get any type of reason or email regarding it. This makes people feel like you are hiding something from them. Shouldn't they have a right to know if their server is down? I think so. Don't take a "Don't ask don't tell" policy. Even if no one notices the downtime, its important to keep them informed, once again its the trust thing. And don't forget to give a detailed description of why it went down, what you did to fix it, and preventing this from happening again.


I hardly see this plausible, let me explain why.
People want politically correct answers, not the truth about what
happened. Example:

"Apache stopped responding because of some f****** up bug in apache, we restarted it. What will we do to prevent it from happening again? Nothing, it's a known issue. There's nothing we can do"

while what people want to hear is:

"At $time today one of our webservers unfortunately stopped responding due to a software glitch. Please note that, $company prides itself upon always delivering high quality services to our clients and will blah blah blah. Thank you...blah blah blah
Thanx for choosing $company"

If there's one thing i've learned doing hosting is that people are stupid and want to buy in to all the b ullshit talk.

If you give people a straight and honest answer they start scratching their head and go "huh?"

If you give them b ullshit talk they smile happily not knowing you literally just a** raped them.



Originally posted by FSFOX
Lastly, if its possible have a way for people to directly get to datacenter workers. (Like if they carry pagers, give out the number...)

Sure, that would be fun for your poor datacenter monkeys.
There is a core router issue, say about 25 000 of your total of 200 000 clients are affected. So, say 10% decides "Hey, let's call the datacenter guys!"
You're being swamped with 2500 calls at that time, and as the dutyful person you are you answer the phone and talk to the clients. Each person you're talking to you feed the same crap about how good you are while you're really thinking "Gesh, can't these people STOP CALLING SO I CAN ATTEND TO MY WORK AND MAYBE HAVE THIS ISSUE FIXED IN THE NEXT 15 MINUTES???"

If you give them b ullshit talk they smile happily not knowing you literally just a** raped them.Probably the most remarkable thing I've seen posted all year. And the company you work for that I should avoid is..?

That's a useful article. Thanks ;)

Originally posted by bear
Probably the most remarkable thing I've seen posted all year. And the company you work for that I should avoid is..?

I'm simply illustrating a point here, we as a company are no worse than all the other large hosting companies out there.
My point being, clients are not at all interested in the reason why something does not work.

They simply want to know:
"does it work now?" yes..
"will it continue to work most/all of the time?" yes

Mind you i'm talking about your average customer here,
not a geek. I'm talking about Joe the farmer and his small website. He has no reason to care about why it didn't work at that specific moment.

Originally posted by whoppe
I hardly see this plausible, let me explain why.
People want politically correct answers, not the truth about what
happened.

I do not agree with you there. 'People' nowadays does not want politically correct answers, we want to have all the information available for us to make an informed decision on. What counts in the fierce webhosting market today is results, not some bs explanations.

Anyone can make it sound good, but only professionals can make it actually work! If you do not want to keep your customers informed, you obviously have something to hide!

We all know servers go down, there is no reason to hide it. Obviously the information should not be available to the general public, but only to customers.

I have been looking for 2-3 years now for an honest webhosting company. I found a pretty ok one some 6 months ago, but it got bought up by another (much bigger) company and it has been going downhill from there.

I strongly believe honesty could be a great selling point for webhosting companies.

Originally posted by Burlington
I do not agree with you there. 'People' nowadays does not want politically correct answers, we want to have all the information available for us to make an informed decision on. What counts in the fierce webhosting market today is results, not some bs explanations.

Anyone can make it sound good, but only professionals can make it actually work! If you do not want to keep your customers informed, you obviously have something to hide!

We all know servers go down, there is no reason to hide it. Obviously the information should not be available to the general public, but only to customers.

I have been looking for 2-3 years now for an honest webhosting company. I found a pretty ok one some 6 months ago, but it got bought up by another (much bigger) company and it has been going downhill from there.

I strongly believe honesty could be a great selling point for webhosting companies.

I would say it depends on your target audience.
I'm talking farmers, grandmothers, small business owners,
aunts who write about their cats and these kind of clients here. These types of clients do represent the majority of the hosting business out there.

You would use a totally different type of tactic if you're going to host technically proficient people that could very well have done the hosting themself but they are just lazy.

Honesty does work, but you have to be the judge on how to deliver that honesty to your client. Each client is different and each situation is different. Some people could easily be insulted by a technical answer and some could appreciate it none the less.

I do computer consulting full time, and I have pissed off people before and I have had people call me a genius, whether they were residential clients or business clients. But hey you learn the hard way. Now what it comes down to is, it just depends on how you interact with them and make them feel about giving you their money for something.

Suggestion, if you want to explain something to a client in technical terms, do your best to help them understand what those terms mean. That way if they are not technically inclined they will either appreciate the anology or tell you "ah, I don't care as long as it's working". But atleast you had the decency to explain them the problem, both technically and in lamans terms. Now explaining technology in lamans terms isnt always easy, but you get better at it with experience. (best piece of advise, don't make them feel stupid).

As for the contact info for datacenters, bad idea! I think if you are the hosting company it is your responsibility to handle the support. Not the "poor monkeys in the datacenter". (I like that quote). As mentioned by whoppe.

And yes, I am a newb when it comes to hosting. I just broke into this business because I do computer consulting and it is a service I know I can offer to many local, and national.

I say give people options, many options in terms of support and explain to them how those options work. Some people might be inept to using AIM or Live Chat, hell some people probably can't find a 800 # located on your hosting site.

But, when they do get a hold of you, stay on top of it! Dropping the ball is by far the worst thing a company can do. (Other than ripping them off).

All of what I have said is stuff I learned the hard way doing computer consulting, and I can in some way relate to hosting.

One other thing, people do need to respect other people and know that we have lives too. Trying to provide 24/7 support isnt easy, so as long as you make it clear to clients that live or direct support only occurs during certain hours then clients should respect that.

Originally posted by whoppe
I would say it depends on your target audience.
I'm talking farmers, grandmothers, small business owners,
aunts who write about their cats and these kind of clients here.

Yeah, I suppose that is right...

(Although doing your best to provide a support service as good as possible ensures you will not miss any types of customers. Is all about on which level you want, and can, put your service on. But well, what works for you may not work for any oher companies.. and thats really a business consideration that maybe is somewhat off-topic in this discussion. )

But... Even Aunt Annie with her cats and other people like that can surprise you in being real techies.. believe me, has happened to me a few times :crap: (Im not a webhost, but I do various consulting).

Adrnalnrsh sums i all up pretty good:

Originally posted by Adrnalnrsh
[B]Honesty does work, but you have to be the judge on how to deliver that honesty to your client. Each client is different and each situation is different. Some people could easily be insulted by a technical answer and some could appreciate it none the less.

And I fully agree on not giving out phone numbers to technical staff in the dc.

This is actually becoming a nice thread =)

To share a little bit about ourself, we're a semi small hosting company with about 6500 - 7000 clients and we're growing with about 2 - 300 accounts/month so we're definately doing something right. No, I will not tell you who we are or anything like that as that is not the purpose here =)

Anyway, I believe in trying to give people a decent answer.
I would say not spend time on making it public when there
has been issues but not lie about it either. If people ask, give
them a honest answer.

We try to treat our clients the right way and in every situation
do what seems like the right thing to do. Ofcourse, that sometimes misses and we're not perfect. Noone is.

As for downtime policy, we got a "if we cannot meet our uptime guarantee, the client should not pay for the months hosting" which we do and have honored before. The client has to let us know that he/she believe we did not meet our quota.

Just an FYI about the datacenter idea, I was referring to if you own your own smaller datacenter, not theplanet or something like that.

Like DINIX offers the datacenter's pager email, and it clearly says

"Our emergency paging systems is reserved for true emergencies such as server reboots or failed services such as Apache, Bind, Email, etc. This will quickly alert a technician to your issue. Please include your ticket number in the message."

Yes, I know some people won't follow this, but a lot should realize that.

As I said, you can take or leave my advice, its your choice.

excellent post FSFOX

Originally posted by whoppe


If there's one thing i've learned doing hosting is that people are stupid and want to buy in to all the b ullshit talk.

If you give people a straight and honest answer they start scratching their head and go "huh?"

If you give them b ullshit talk they smile happily not knowing you literally just a** raped them.








I'm not in to web hosting business , but i am into a business where i deal with customer who don't know that much about what the problem was and what i did. but they are that its fixed.

and i must say people are not thick, and if you bu***it them they know it! they just don't make it obvious to you. and just call you a pric* .