7) 24/7 Customer Support can be the biggest myth. Their are many companies out their that claim to offer this service but when you open a support ticket you don’t get an answer for over 6 hours. Or if they offer phone support and you try and call them in the middle of the night and the phone rings or goes to voice mail you’ve probably been had. If you are thinking about choosing a web hosting company try out their support number or emails before you sign up and see what kind of response you get and how fast.
6) Green Web Hosting are they really green? Depends on your definition of green. Many web host are now buying “green” energy from energy providers and then calling themselves green. Yes, this is a huge step but one person’s definition of green isn’t the same as others. Some host may only provide green energy to their offices and not their data centers while others the other way around. Contact the specific web host and ask them specific questions about being green.
5) Host Unlimited Domains is another marketing term that many fall for. With some web host you can indeed host numerous web sites in one account as long as you do not use more server resources than what is aloud. Check with your web hosts terms of service and see what the specific server resource limits are because these vary greatly depending on the web host.
4) Free Website Submission to the major search engines. Some web hosting companies make you think you have to pay for this or this is some sort of big secret.
http://www.google.com/addurl/
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx
3) Web Hosting Review web sites want you to think they have detailed reviews and list the top 10 web hosting companies based on actually facts. What they don’t tell you is often times the top 10 web hosting list are all generated and ordered by how much each company pays in affiliate commissions.
2) Unmetered Hosting Accounts aren’t really feasible for most. You should be extremely worried if the price for this service is under $20.00 per month. Bandwidth prices have come down in the past few years but not near enough to offer “Unmetered Hosting Accounts” for less than $20.00 per month.
1) There is no such thing as “Unlimited Web Hosting” and/or “Unlimited Bandwidth” these are just marketing terms that companies use to get people with no clue to sign up for their hosting services. Don’t fall for the biggest advertising gimmick in today’s market.
On November 23, 2008 at 10:00 PM PST we updated our ticket support system with new and improved software. We strive to find better ways to help our customers and our old support ticket software was OK but not great. It lacked some functions that we really need like;
1) ability to move tickets between departments
2) ability to assign tickets to a specific staff member
3) ability to suggest knowledgebase articles
There are other reasons but the above mentioned were are main criteria. We were able to close most of the open support tickets with our old system prior to the software switch. Those that had tickets opened 24 hours later on the 24th of November had new tickets created as we turned off the old system at that time. We are happy to report that the transition was smooth and the new support software is working great.
The main support URL has changed to this one here. I recommend to all our clients to bookmark this page for future reference. You can also access the support department via any page of our website in the top navigation.
After I explained our unique business name in my last blog post, I thought it was only right to now discuss why we got into web hosting. The simple answer is because we can do it better. Over the past six years we have dealt with numerous hosting companies, most on behalf of our clients but some we had accounts with ourselves. During this time we dealt with poor customer support more times than anyone should have to.
As the Co-founder and President of McKremie, LLC this frustrated me to no end. I have over 16 years experience in training, coaching, managing, and helping improve customer service techniques for some major brands. Most of my entire career has been spent focusing on customer relations so it made for a simple choice. I know there are thousands of web hosting companies in the market but most lack truly great service.
The web hosting business is all about customer service. When someone signs up for web hosting they are not signing up for hardware that will run their web sites. Instead they are signing up for the service that comes with the hardware. The most expensive servers in the world won’t do you any good if you don’t have the knowledge and skills to keep them running. The web hosting business is all about support and being a successful hosting company is about how promptly and professionally you handle customer issues.
When we spoke with our customers the number one issue they had with their previous hosting company was the level of support they received. We have dealt with ourselves as well as heard about the horrible foreign support some companies use. It can be very frustrating when your website isn’t working. What’s more frustrating than that is, when you get someone on the other end of the phone that is hard to understand and isn’t properly trained for their job.
For about five years now we have been in the web hosting business. Back in the January of 2005 we started by hosting a handful of web sites from local merchants in our area. As the months went along we gained more and more hosting clients from the local business community. Most of which were referrals from our current clients. When I spoke with new clients they would mention that they heard of us at a chamber of commerce mixer or from a friend. Over the past few years the confidence in McKremie has spread from local merchants to the International level. We currently host web sites for customers from all over the world. As we keep growing I would just like to thank our current customers that have helped make us what we are today.
