Why don't all webhosts offer a webforum for their clients? Wouldn't this greatly reduce the ammount of technical support emails they have to deal with?

I think it would, since other clients can help newbie clients, etc.

All you webhosts out there that might be reading this, please take this into consideration...it would really speed up important tech support questions, and allow your clients to form a stronger community.

Just my two cents...

Ours can be found here
http://www.pcisd.com/cgi-bin/Ultraboard/UltraBoard.pl

Even if your not a customer and there is something here that can help you please feel free to look around.

I think Davey from TrueHosting should setup a message board for his clients. If he does, wouldn't this show that he actually does have clients who respect and enjoy the services he provides?

PCISD, you are doing great! I really do feel that the more a host tries to form a community among their clients, the better off they will be in gaining trust and possibly even more clients in the long run.

PCISD,

Don't you have any clients? Your BBS is empty and deserted.

Message boards are not helpful unless there are a lot of clients. We have 100 hosted domains and our message board has gotten a total of 12 posts since it was opened in September and only one was web hosted account related. Most people just e-mail us and even that number is small. With 100 active accounts, we only receive about 3 tech support e-mails a week.

Another WebHost
What is you URL?

I think it is a good sign with our board.

Shows must of our customers are happy and our control panel is very user friendly :-)

Exactly, PCISD. What that other host is overlooking is the value of perception as well as overt helpfulness. On a site that otherwise seemed trustworthy, where indications are that messages were not removed from the forum to cover up any problems, the lack of a lot of problems or questions would be an indicator that the company is doing well in that respect.

If there are any problems or questions, how they are dealt with says much more for the company than if they are removed.

The programs I use on my site have open forums and no message is removed (except by the person who posted it). Installation, usage, feature requests, and other questions are discussed, as well as bugs.

The quality of the programs is such that any bugs tend to be small ones and most are rapidly fixed. Sometimes it takes help from users to find the cause of a bug that affects only a few people.

Hosting companies could use their forums for support issues, discuss features, including feature requests, in their control panel, how to use them, spam prevention, and more.

Even if the forum doesn't get used much, just having one can be an indicator of the responsiveness of the company.

[This message has been edited by Duster (edited 03-29-2000).]

You guys need to change the font on your control panel. The blue is too hard to see against the black. :) Just trying to help.

I tried PCISD's trial and it looks great. I wasn't really interested in getting hosting just then, but being able to test things out first is very cool.

I think the control panel should be changed to a white background (maybe your site too)...sometimes darker backgrounds make it hard to read (for me at least) and need to turn off all the lights just so my eyes won't start hurting. Change the colors (minor suggestion) and I think more people will be turned on to your website.

I will most likely turn to your company when my account with an other company expires...hehe they don't even have a control panel which is a must in todays hosting industry. :)

We are in the process of a new control panel right now. I think the outcome will be 300x better than out current control panel.

I made a promise sometime back to provide good service and I am trying my hardest:-)
Thanks for the tips and support...

What color should I change the font in the CP?

Does each domain or website you host come with a dedicated IP address?

No, we had to do this because if we give IP's out then someone can get a free website with us forever as we use the domain name to stop someone from signing up again and again.

We can give out IP's but it would be on a seprate server and most of the time requires payment upfront.

white

How come other host can provide dedicated IP Address and yours cannot? I like the services at PCISD but without dedicated IP address I am having second thoughts. How can someone register a domain again and again, can you explain?

PCISD can, but the 30 day deal wouldn't work with it. Since someone could signup again and again using different domains and then just point the one domain to the IP address given for the other domains it would make it easy to get free hosting forever. For example if DomainA.com signed up for domainA.com and pointed to 198.834.943.32 then the 30 days were up... the person could signup for hikugenics.com(don't ask where the name came from...), get a new IP (198.834.943.84) and just point DomainA.com to the new IP address.

Our host site is http://web.rietta.com. We have a forum at http://www.rietta.com/ubb. It has not been used much and Jonathan and I have been recently talking about removing it all together. After reading this thread, I think we will have to reconsider.

Like the “Another Host,” we get relatively few support requests. Some people assume that when a host spends time in a forum like this trying to help out people who are not customers and potentially getting a little extra business that the host is neglecting their current customers. In my company, customers are our number one priority. If we get 10 support requests in a week I consider it a busy support week.

As for removing threads, the only ones that we have removed came from a looser who was not even a customer. He apparently thought it was funny to post 98 messages with nothing but cuss words.

Best regards,
Frank Rietta