My own past (bad) experiences.

Back in 2005 I had a website that I chose to have built by a so called web site company. As soon as my check cleared I had nothing but little problems that drove me crazy. The first thing I realized was they spent all of their time and resources on sales instead of service. They were really good at taking the orders but after that they stunk. I would submit content via email and postal mail and they would build a website. Every time they made a change, I would go online and take a look at it. I couldn’t believe all the spelling and grammar errors they would actually post to the web. These guys were supposed to be professional publishers? It got to the point where I would submit changes and wait 2 days for a response telling me they received the changes and would apply them within 2 days. so 4 days go by and I still need them to fix the typos. by the time everything was said and done 6 or 7 days had gone by to make simple changes. I almost forgot to mention that I got all of this service for $35.99 a month plus I had to buy the domain. I could go on and on but I won’t, the point is, I love being able to have full control of my own content. Now if I want to make changes, it just takes a minute to do so, and it only costs me $9.95 a month. I won’t even bother with bashing their name (TotalBiz 24-7) because they went out of business shortly after I dumped the service.

Another hosting issue I’ve had in the past was with a “do-it-yourself” site building host. When I signed up for the hosting they had full support by email and phone. About 2 months into the service everything was going fine until I stopped getting emails from customers. Normally this was no big deal not to get an email for a day or 2, but for 4 days in a row I had not received any. After diagnosing everything on my end I determined it had to be coming from the hosting company’s servers. I went to find the phone number for the host, only to find that they recently did away with their phone support. Now I am left with nothing but an email to send them. After about 6 hours I got a response back and they eventually solved the problem. This was not just a blog site, it was a product site that was potentially costing me money the whole time my email was down. This I why I’m such a big advocate for phone support. I won’t bash these guys to hard either because other than no phone support everything ran pretty smooth. I guess the whole point of all this (at least in my opinion) is quality = support, and we only seem to figure this out when something goes haywire.

Are you ready for real customer service? Check out the web host I use.