Even if you are an experienced webmaster you will need to contact the support team time from time in order to solve problems which can be either on your side or web hosting company side. Everybody would like to get quick and skilled answer in such situation. Continue reading to learn how to recognize good web hosting customer support sooner then you will really need its help.
1. Search for experience of others. Visit web hosting reviews sites (I mean those with reviews posted by real customers), ask in hosting forums or google for terms like "company name experience". Be patient -- it is possible that a few top links will point to the sites with paid advertisements. If this happen, scroll down and try to find some real reviews.
2. Test it yourself. Look for contact form on the web hosting company website and send them a few questions. Send the same questions to 5 - 10 hosting providers and compare the time they need for the answer and also the quality of the response. Start with a few simple questions and if the response time will be good try them later with more difficult questions (e. g. Will my wordpress weblog run with your PHP version?).
3. Some web hosts do not provide online contact form to avoid spam. Their customers usually can open ticket from the control panel. Because you are not their customer so you don't have access to the clients area you should look for control panel demo and submit a ticket from there. You can also check out previous tickets submitted by the other people testing their ticketing system. This will give you an idea about the average response time and quality of the answers.
4. If the web host provides online chat try it. Take into account how long you need to wait before some member of the customer support will start the chat with you.
5. Keep in mind that not all web hosts are located in the same time zone. Try to contact them in different hours before you will make any decision.
6. Always check if you got reply from human or only automatic message from autoresponder. Some companies analyze keywords in the ticket and this way they try to guess what you are asking for. This works fine if you send some basic question but if you need more skilled answer you will need to wait until somebody from the support staff will help you.
When you are finished with the customer support testing don't forget to test other important aspects of the web hosting service. Technical support is important but you need more to host your website without problems. You should to test at least uptime and the overall reliability. This can be done by searching for uptime stats on uptime monitoring services. Don't look for the uptime on the companies website. Instead search for third party websites providing independent statistics. Uptime better than 99.9% can be considered excellent, uptime from 99.7% - 99.9% is fine.
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