Often a way in which we find out if something is good or not is after having spent money to find out that a service or product was fantastic or a real let down.

But sometimes you can get a taster of how a company may perform and when it comes to support offered by a web host you can get at least a hint of how good or bad the support that is offered may be without having to spend any money.

Its quite normal that you might have a question or two to ask, maybe you need to know something that isn't stated on the web hosts website or you want absolute confirmation on something.

What you can do is send an email or if you prefer to, phone the support number on the website of the webhost and ask them any questions that you have, try to do this mostly if you do have genuine questions though and not for the sake of going through the process.

Things that you want to make a note of will be how long it takes you to get through to the support team of any department that they may have in place, how easy it is to communicate with the people dealing with you, how knowledgeable they may appear or even if the person speaking to you cant give you an answer to your questions, are they still very helpful by passing you onto someone within the company who can answer your questions?

This is perfectly acceptable, if you are not being passed on from one person to another and getting no where but are actually being passed onto someone with more specific knowledge within the company then this is good.

Something worth keeping in mind is a lot of companies will naturally be polite, helpful and very friendly while they are trying to net you as a new customer, but once the honeymoon period is over with them it can often change quite quickly and customers find themselves feeling quickly disappointed and wondering where all that helpfulness went.

But you get the idea, and if your first couple of emails or phone calls to a potentially new web host for you are not helpful, rude and not making you feel comfortable then this could be a hint that you may not experience any improvement on this should you choose to use a company with a poor response.

Remember that a lot of companies will be great while they see another potentially new customer but may be a let down soon afterwards, but they may not and sometimes a positive sign from your first email or phone call with them can be a taste of how well they will work with you, should you decide to sign up with them and become a customer.

Waiting times for a response will most likely vary, it could depend on the time when you contact them or what part of the week, although many hosts will offer 24/7 support, at weekends there may be less staff in place or a large hosting company may have thousands of customers and may find themselves quite busy, so sometimes a wait can be normal, but within reason too, if you simply dont get an answer then this is a major alarm bell, if a company doesn't get back to you and you maybe resent an email and know that it was delivered then you dont want to take the risk of choosing a web host that is this bad and that chooses to simply ignore customers.

During your testing of support at different companies do be realistic, if they haven't replied after 20mins thats not unreasonable but if they takes days then repond poorly when they do then just keep this in mind that thay may offer poor support all of the time.

The quality of support will really matter at those times when you actually need it, even if you wont require support often.

Filed under: General Web Hosting Info by admin Published July 12, 2008