I was just wondering if anyone has considered offering support via SMS or if any hosts are known to offer such a service?

It might seem like a daft idea but why not? What are the pro's and con's of offering this service?

Its a good idea if you have server monitoring which sends you a SMS if your server goes down, then you can text your server provider for support while your away from home etc.
Although it could end up costing the host quite abit each month if they send a lengthy SMS.

I'm not considering on providing a service like this, I would just like to know your views on it and what you think the pro's and con's are. Discuss!

Danny. :)

Well do you mean actual conversations via SMS? I'm sure this could work for a quick status update on a situation but when discussing a situation it would probably run into problems.

I think what would be a good idea is to be able to receive alerts via SMS as a customer when your server goes "down" etc. I don't understand why somebody would need SMS support when they can just telephone? Perhaps cost of phone calls is an issue for customers, in which case maybe an SMS service in which the customer could SMS a number to receive a callback from the provider? Just an idea on how to use SMS...

I think it may be worth it if you have higher end clients.

Maybe £2.50/mo extra or something, and you assign them a special account manager who they can text if they need help or something.

I wouldn't include this free - no way. I would sell it as a VIP style thing, for customers who are on the move.

I was just wondering if anyone has considered offering support via SMS or if any hosts are known to offer such a service?

It might seem like a daft idea but why not? What are the pro's and con's of offering this service?

Its a good idea if you have server monitoring which sends you a SMS if your server goes down, then you can text your server provider for support while your away from home etc.
Although it could end up costing the host quite abit each month if they send a lengthy SMS.

I'm not considering on providing a service like this, I would just like to know your views on it and what you think the pro's and con's are. Discuss!

Danny. :)

As far as monitoring goes, I found this site offering the service which sends you SMS warnings if something happens to your site:
http://www.trendics.com/
It's cool to check out. Maybe some of you hosts/users out there can actually make good use of it..

and as far as offering this type of support VIA SMS goes, I would say it's a cool idea but might be a bit costly. But still, you should probably try it.. it might even bring your sales up.

Today reach-ability being an issue it is really a good idea. When service providers face a downtime (either b/w or server)it becomes very difficult for them to inform the customers as they are already busy rectifying the issue. And if the customers are huge then pratically impossible to reach them, by the time you even think of calling them, the calls starts flowing in. So SMS becomes a good medium to immediately inform all the customers, atleast most of them. But the only problem in this technology is the reliability of SMS reaching the end mobile phone which is faced by all today.

I've seen some hosts offering this service. Seems like a great addition.