If you’re a web hosting reseller and you’ve ever had a flood of support requests from your clients at 1AM on a Sunday morning because a server is down, you know how awful that feeling is when you can’t reach your hosting company to resolve the issue. Your only recourse is to submit a support ticket and wait (sometimes up to 24 hours) for a response. Meanwhile your customers are growing angrier by the minute and there’s nothing you can do. Unfortunately, that’s the way a great many web hosting companies function as it has become an acceptable way of providing technical support to web hosting customers, even those who’ve signed up for reseller hosting plans.

Obviously it’s much cheaper to simply reply on a web based ticketing system or email. Web based systems and email based technical support are a critical part of any hosting company’s technical support operations.

Sometimes a web hosting customer will have a login/password issue, need some help with a piece of code or have some other issue that requires actual text be sent back and forth between the client and the tech. In other cases, the issue at hand may simply not be that urgent and the customer does not require the immediacy that phone support can bring. Without a doubt, every serious web hosting company must have some type of web and/or email based ticketing system to serve their customers.

But let’s get back to 1Am on Sunday morning again. Let’s say like many web designers, coders and programmers, you like to work late into the night and that’s the time you finally have to sit down and bang out some much needed work on your new site. You make yourself a cup of coffee and fire up your browser only to see some dreaded error, telling you your site is unreachable.

What can you do now? You can submit a ticket to your hosting company’s help desk and just hope that someone will see it and jump on it right away, but you’re basically operating blindly, dead in the water and at the mercy of some web based ticket queue. It’s not going to be a fun night.

Or how about this example. What if one one of your clients is having some strange intermittent email issue that you’re unable to diagnose and resolve on your own. You need to contact your host to figure this one out. So you submit a ticket describing the issue as best you can. Even in a best case scenario, where your host guarantees a response in under an hour, you get a reply back from the tech asking for the name of the POP account in question. You reply back with that info and 45 minutes later, the tech replies back asking for the IP address that your client is connecting from. You get the picture. Hours going back and forth with some overworked tech who’s trying to resolve a dozen issues all at once right now. It could take all night before your issue finally gets resolved.

Now let’s take a look at this same situation, but in this case you have 24 hour access, 7 days a week to your hosting company’s tech support department through a toll free 800 number. You dial up your host’s tech support department and within a few minutes, you are able to explain the issue and the tech is able to offer a solution. You are back in business and your client is a happy camper.

Although web based ticketing systems are an important part of any hosting operation, for both shared web hosting customers and reseller hosting customers, having access to a toll free 800 number 24 hours a day is extremely crucial. If your business is reseller hosting and your clients are counting on you for their businesses, then toll free phone support is essential.

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