Developing eWrite

I work with a lot of websites using plenty of different hosting companies. Most are excellent and provide all the neccessary tools though some lack some obvious resources. It can be frustrating when making a small update to a customers site on their behalf only to find that it will take a day or more becuase the hosting company doesn’t allow you to perfom X or Y without jumping through 50 hoops.

This frustration becomes more obvious when you find a great provider and start moving anything you can over to them but you still have some smaller sites on backwards hosting even if it is to their financial benefit to change.

This post is more of a rant than anything productive which Im not to pleased about however I will be happy when a number of domains expire in the coming year and I’ll have the opportunity to move more businesses away from these costly and frustrating hosting providers. Hes a list of the Do’s and Don’ts that I’d recommend for any hosting provider.

Do’s

• Have competitive prices, not 20+ Euro for a .com
• Have a live chat on your website for Support and Sales enquires. It doesn’t have to be 24/7.
• Have a ticketing system allowing emails to be set to support@yourdomain with an autoresponder.
• Have a control panel on your hosting space such as Helm, DirectAdmin or Plesk to allow items such as creating email addresses, file management, databases etc.
• Have a great, easy to use file manager that allows a person to change file and folder permissions.
• Have a presence on social networking apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku or IM.
• Have the support staff arrive in to work at 9am or beforehand, not after 11am.
• Allow a technical member of staff to answer technical questions.
• Have some method of notifying clients when serious errors have occurred on a server which have effected your site.
• Have the traffic logs available for more than 5 days, I will happily use the webspace allocated to me for their storage and manage their overall size myself.
• Provide Windows And Linux hosting
• Provide Tutorials on your site
• Support .htaccess
• Have great prices for domains, redirecting domains and hosting packages.
• Allow *’s in the password fields, or specifically say they’re not allowed. Don’t tell me its not secure.
• Have special offers every month or so for offers on domain names or hosting packages.
• Have a blog, talk about the in’s and out’s of a hosting company
• Talk to or acknowledge people who continually refer business to you every month.
• Provide access to DNS / domain related stuff
• Allow access to Cron
• Use a webmail facility that allows email users to update their email address passwords
• Ask the user if they are now ok and if its ok to close the support ticket.
• A text alert notifying me of critical errors on the server where my site is hosted would be excellent, I’d pay for this.

Don’t

• Charge a customer for moving a domain name to another provider. Its probably your fault they’re moving.
• Force a developer to have to ask the website owner to contact the hosting company to request simple things like updating file permissions.
• Prevent PHP from creating tables in a mySQL database.
• Reply by email and say please log into the support section to create a ticket.
• Supply only Windows hosting.
• Take several days to respond to a support email
• Hide behind signatures like ‘Support Staff’
• Use the H-Sphere control panel
• Bother with different skins for the control panel (H-Sphere)
• Allow your Support system to go offline for over a week because someone forgot to renew something
• Put a secretary in between a customer requesting specific technical support and a member of support staff.

I sing Blacknights praises all the time and direct any business to them that I can because they do it all very very well.

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Tags: blacknight, hosting, hosting provider, support

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 7:16 pm and is filed under business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.