The Importance of Good Web Hosting Support
If you run any type of business and have a website then you know how crucial it is for your site to be up and running at all times. Unfortunately, there are times when your site may go down. When this happens you want to have a good support system in place. Of course customer support is an item that you should consider before selecting your web host.
Here are a few things to take into consideration when looking for a web hosting company, when it comes to customer support.
- Contacting Support – do you have more than one method for contacting support? Ideally they should have a live chat and phone support along with email support.
- How long does it take to get a response? This is critical to know and can affect the amount of time your website is out of commission. If your only method is to email them, you want to know how long it takes to receive a reply. Ideally before you need to use this method. Test out their response time by emailing a few questions to them.
- Does the company back up your site automatically? This is not something that all hosting companies do. Even if they offer this service, you should get into the habit of running your own backups. You can schedule this as a daily, weekly or monthly occurrence.
Sometimes your website will go down because you did something wrong inside your site. This might be trying to upload a script or a plugin that caused a conflict. Or your web host may have taken your sites offline because you used up your quota of bandwidth or disk space. As you reach your limits, some companies will notify you that you are reaching the maximum amounts, while others will just take your sites down. This is something that you should be aware of and you should be checking your bandwidth usage regularly.
Communicating with support is a two way street. If you experience any issues or have concerns then send in a support ticket. Ideally your hosting company will do the same for you, if you are using up too many resources they should send out a warning first.
Get into the habit of performing regular backups and saving a copy on a USB Stick or on a separate drive. This way if something happens to your site, you can easily restore the latest version.
