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**Hosting Support – An Introduction**

Imagine yourself as a person running a small-medium sized online store that concentrates on affordably prized gift items, and say, it’s Christmas time. Everybody is on a shopping spree, and you have been waiting for this vacation to arrive, as it is the time of the year when your business really blooms, and with which revenues you have got to plan for the year to come.

**Say your site goes down due to some sort of problems associated with your server on say, the 23rd of December, or on Christmas eve.**

You will be contacting your hosting company in frenzy, and just imagine if there’s nobody there to provide you with prompt support and resolution for your issue. By the time boxing day arrives, nobody will need to send gifts anymore to anyone. You have lost your business, and now your site and business has got a notorious reputation of not being active when it counts.

**The above is just a worse case scenario explained to put forward a point. Quality support is the backbone of a hosting company. It is the pillar on which a hosting firm rests it’s credibility. Speedy and accurate customer service is rare and indicates a superior overall hosting service. When choosing a web host, what customers generally look for are Server performance, Space, Traffic allowed, Features, Cost, and most importantly Customer support.**

If a hosting company is one which takes it’s business seriously, their technical support must be perfect by all means. Determining whether technical support is dependable is important, because if anything goes wrong with your site, you are going to be contacting your know-it-all customer care rep. However, in the real world, we know that knowledgeable customer care is hard to find.

**Most of the hosting companies claim that they have techs working round the clock in their organizations, managing their state-of-the art systems.**

While this in fact may be true, sometimes, the people working with the support might be the most unprofessional and underqualified ones. Due to the huge demand for information technology professionals today, many web hosts are not able to find employees who are well trained in OS concepts, network technology and control panel specifications. Other firms pump in a lot of money to advertising and marketing and gives good quality customer support only the lowest priority. In both instances, it is the customers who eventually suffers due to the lack of competence in handling their issues related to hosting.

**The following is a small article gives a brief insight into the hosting support considerations for the newbies in business, as well as any host who have got high regards for the quality standards of their company. Before proceeding, please keep in mind the fact that Web Hosting Support is not child’s play. It is something that is NOT to be taken for granted.**

**Finding the Right Support for you**

Finding the perfect support for your company is not a very easy task. Every webhost who have got serious thoughts about their hosting support would be having certain expectation levels regarding the quality of support. Only if your support matches / outperforms your expectations would you feel relaxed, relieved and be happy with them.

**The very first concern regarding support is how to keep things going 24 / 7.**

Every webhost provides their customers with a 24 / 7 support promise, and some even give their customers a money back guarantee on any failure to keep up the promise. You should be implementing methods to ensure that your support team covers the 24 hours of the day effectively, and co-ordinate between them regarding the technical and administrative aspects of your servers.

**Then comes the cost part. There are options for maintaining an inhouse team of technical experts, or outsourcing to an outsourced hosting support company.**

You should choose your support wisely with efficient computations of your expenditure and profit margin. You should do it in such a way that the quality of support is not compromised, and at the same time you have the decent profit to enhance your business in the long run. Please note that in the very beginning itself, you should set the standards, and should never go below them. Remember – It’s a jungle out there, with huge competition. If you have to survive, you have to be the best; and to be the best, you have got to give your customers the best. Manage high standards…. returns would come automatically.

**Web hosting support not only means providing technical solutions to your end customers; but the sales / billing support and timely administration of your servers are equally important.**

You can manage the sales / billing issues yourself, or you can avail the aid of a graduate with good customer skills, and excellent knowledge on the packages / features / options that you provides. Regarding the server administration, you require the service of a good system administrator to perform the timely software upgrades, and the other fine tuning aspects of the server for it’s smooth functioning. It is always an additional advantage to maintain a team of technical experts who can perform your technical support as well as server administration; rather than having separate teams for the same. It would reduce the overall costs involved, and will enhance quality of customer support due to the better knowledge of the servers.

**In-House or Outsourced??**

Now comes the big question. Do you need an in-house team of technicians, or do you want to outsource your support to a support company? There has been disputes over this on most of the web hosting forums. Both the options has got advantages and disadvantages. But on tallying with the positive and negative sides of both of them, my vote goes to outsourced support. A comparison of the advantages is provided in the chart below:

**ADVANTAGES**

– *In-House*
1) Direct interaction with the support staff in person
2) Direct recruitment of the support staff yourself, so as to meet your ideal requirements on first-hand
3) Local market knowledge and expertise when it comes to sales and marketing
4) Ready availability-upon-call of your in house team in case of any emergency

– *Outsourced*
1) Far cheaper than what is required to maintain an inhouse support team
2) You can concentrate on your business marketing, while the outsource company takes care of the technical side.
3) Expertise in specific fields related to every server software.
4) No hassles with the planning of shifts or personnel to manage the 24 / 7 support, as it is taken care of by the outsource company.
5) No issues associated with training the support staff.

Outsource companies are able to provide you with high quality, but cheap support due to the low cost of living standards in those countries. Most of the hosting companies are located in the United States, Canada and Europe, and the major outsource companies are located in countries like India. Due to the comparatively lower cost of living in countries like India, the above is made possible. With inhouse support, you have to pay the wages that is par with the living standards in the United States and such; which makes it an expensive option.

There are several myths related to outsourcing jobs. According to the trade and foreign aid research conducted by The Heritage Foundation , the American economy has only benefitted from outsourcing jobs to the asian countries, and has not gone down, as the general concept is.

But with outsourced support, you have got to make the right choice. Due to the huge demand for professionals in the ITES (Information Technology Enables Services), many webhosts can’t find employees with expertise in the relevant fields. You should be doing a research on the work culture and standards of the different outsourced companies before making the right source. A search for the leading outsourced companies in forums like [WebHostingTalk](http://webhostingtalk.com) can provide you with pro and con views that you’ll require to make the decision.

Still, most of the outsourced companies provide you with a testing period of upto a month to test them out. You can utilize this time period to analyze the quality of your support company, if you are not sure about it.

**The disadvantages associated with the two types of support are provided in the chart below:**

**DISADVANTAGES**

– *In-House*
1) Expensive when taking into consideration the living standards in North America and Europe
2) Headaches related to personnel management related with maintaining an inhouse team for support

– *Outsourced*
None provided in the content
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Ihab Salloum