Web hosting value adds?

SenseiSteve

HD Moderator
Staff member
Among the value adds I envision as important for a web hosting provider – state-of-the-art infrastructure, competent and professional 24×7 support and hands-on expertise rank high. Every provider it seems, has bronze, silver and gold plans or something similar.

For providers, if your value add is e-commerce, disaster recovery or managed services, how do you communicate what makes your service unique, and worth the price you advertise?

Certainly, value adds are competition driven. Do your prospects and clients know how you differ from your competition? Telling them, or not, will impact your business.

Your thoughts?
 
We differ from competitions with our green commitment, too many hosts use carbon-emitting data centers, we use only green ones. We try to make it clear in our adverts.
 
In the old days, just having a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with a 99.9% uptime commitment, and a guaranteed refund/credit for each hour of downtime, was enough to sway some users.

These days, time is of the essence in most value ads. Whether that's website speed, or customer response time. 24x7 help is a nice advertisement, but often it's a Level 1 tech (or below) that is reading out of a book. The upsell would be 24x7 server admin support - someone that can actually resolve the issue rather than flagging it from Bob when he gets in the next morning.

Phone support is an upsell to many people, but waiting on hold for 45 minutes has never been a "help" in my book. I dread calling some hosting companies as they don't offer helpdesk tickets :(

So, the initial sell of the customer for the value add is all done via the website and sometimes via video, and then each month, re-enforce those upsells via a monthly newsletter. Talk about the improvements, response times on tickets, how many tickets were opened, unique situations that were resolved, etc etc. Those stories and stats can keep a customer around much longer than expected.
 
Phone support is an upsell to many people, but waiting on hold for 45 minutes has never been a "help" in my book. I dread calling some hosting companies as they don't offer helpdesk tickets :(

Phone support can be great but I don't think it should ever be offered in place of written forms of communication, only ever as an added extra.

Recently I had to contact a domain registrar for a client and they only offered phone support, no tickets and no published mail address, which since I am in a 9 hour different time zone was a real hassle.
 
Phone support can be great but I don't think it should ever be offered in place of written forms of communication, only ever as an added extra.

Recently I had to contact a domain registrar for a client and they only offered phone support, no tickets and no published mail address, which since I am in a 9 hour different time zone was a real hassle.

We agree and most of our clients prefer tickets, over phone calls.
 
We agree and most of our clients prefer tickets, over phone calls.

I think it's much easier for clients to have things in any kind of written form than to be given info over the phone, it's easier to refer back to in the future, and it's definitely much better if you are giving them any kind of commands that they need to type somewhere.

Phone support can only offer that if a transcript is sent out after the call, but in most cases that isn't going to happen.

For sales, billing, and broad discussion of system setup or hosting needs then yes, phone is great, for tech support less so I think.
 
This is an interesting one, good topic too!
Like you said what makes you different.

For us as a company we know that there is a lot of competition out there our difference is we try and push our customer service, as most users of shared hosting already know what they're doing so when they need support they need to know that we can fix their issues in a timely matter. We utilize our live chat a lot. Often can fix any issues that may come up right there in chat and the user does not have to wait for a ticket response, though on the other hand like already said users like a paper trail.
 
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