Web hosting is to an Internet Marketing business what water and electricity are to a restaurant business. You cannot make money when your site is down. Yesterday, I mentioned that MasonWorld.com was going down for a few minutes, but I did not say why. It turns out that my blog was going down because of excellent customer service.
Huh?
You heard me. Excellent customer service was taking my blog down. It turns out that over the last couple of weeks I had been noticing some “performance issues” on MasonWorld.com and some of the other 50-some-odd sites that I host on this server.
Running A Business Using A Virtual Private Host
Unlike a lot of web host accounts that you can get for just a few dollars a month, the server that hosts MasonWorld.com is a Virtual Private Server (VPS). If you are not familiar with that term, a VPS is like a dedicated server, only there are “several” truly isolated and private environments running at the same time. Each customer maintains root access, their own software and they can depend on guaranteed resources.
A good VPS provides enterprise-class features such as off-server backups, redundant power supplies and hot-swap components. For example, my VPS (server) at ServInt has the following cool features: 1 GB Burst RAM, 384 MB Guaranteed RAM,15 GB Storage, Unlimited Domains, Unlimited User Accounts, CentOS 5 Operating System, cPanel, Dual Xeon 3 GHz or Better, 8 GB Registered ECC RAM, U320 SCSI HD in Hardware RAID 10, etc. You get the idea.
But My Server Was Sick – I needed Help
I am not sure why, but my server was sick. I was seeing slow page load times and other weird behavior. I am a tech geek guy, but I could not diagnose the problem. So, I put in a ticket with the ServInt (Network Operations Center) NOC. I explained my situation.
Within minuted the service team assigned the ticket to a tech and got to work. I could tell that they were working on the system almost immediately because I got notices about services restarting and other stuff.
So here is the cool thing — they apparently could not quickly identify the specific problem. Now, at this point other web hosts that I have been with in the past would have blamed me or claimed the problem was not on their end. In these cases you get a ticket response like “reinstall WordPress” or “it’s working fine here.” Not these guys. They just simply moved me to another server. It took a few minutes of down time, and BINGO! Problem Solved.
That was way better service than I expected.
Demand First Rate Customer Service From Your Hosting Company
I have heard so many horror stories about bad hosting companies. To that, I say — don’t settle for it. If your hosting company has poor customer service, find another one. Ask the new company to help you move your account and all your files (most will do this happily).
I love the service I am getting from ServInt. You should expect the same from your hosting company.
Regards,
Mark
