Do Customers Actually Care Who Your Upstream Provider Is?

[SenseiSteve]

Some resellers proudly disclose their infrastructure partner, while others keep everything completely white label.

Have your customers ever asked who hosts your servers?

Does transparency help build trust, or do clients simply care that their websites stay online and perform well?

 

[Mivocloud]

That's a very good question.

In fact, we don't get asked about this all that often - for our clients, it's more important that the servers run stably and that tech support responds quickly. This is the foundation, and I think that's what matters most.

 

[AlexTechie]

Some resellers proudly disclose their infrastructure partner, while others keep everything completely white label.

Have your customers ever asked who hosts your servers?

Does transparency help build trust, or do clients simply care that their websites stay online and perform well?

I agree with @Mivocloud , In our experience clients don't usually ask who hosts the infrastructure. They care more about stable servers, good performance, & responsive support. That's what matters most.

 

[bigredseo]

It seems that the clients we've been working with over the past couple of years have no idea what a CDN is, let alone what an internet backbone is or what N+1 redundancy is.

Now, years ago, back in the early to mid 2000's, we would get a fairly regular flow of people wanting to know who the provider was, mainly because they were moving their ecommerce store from a competitor because it was slow and they didn't want to face the same thing. Same with the "who owns your server" question - MOST did not care who owned the server, but as a hosting company we were proud to say that we owned the machines (until we offloaded everything 🙂)

I think it's more of something the hosting company cares about and less what the client thinks. Sometimes we brag or promote things that are often only important to ourselves. The fact that all servers are running 128GB of RAM and are using Raid-50 SSD drives means absolutely nothing to 99% of clients.

 

[NiceNIC]

Most customers probably don’t care who the upstream is when everything works. They care when something breaks.

That’s why I think the upstream matters a lot more to the provider than the customer. Fast escalation, stable service and having a clean way to move if things go bad all end up reflecting on your own brand.