Support

[Tekorium]

I have to admit I'm a bit disappointed. I was about to sign up, but I though I'd check the 24x7 nature of the support. We use a number of hosts, and left one recently because the so called 'live help' was some sort of call-center operation from India... the support operative knew nothing, and have VERY limited powers indeed over what he could do in the event of problems.

I asked a few basic questions here to test, and received responses which made me suspicious. So I asked the question: "Are you in Texas, or is this support outsourced to India or somewhere?" I immediately got the message: "Your party has left this session."

I clicked the live support box and tried again:
" My session with you was cut off for reason. Anyhow, the question I asked: Are you in Texas, or is this live support outsourced to India or somewhere?"

The response was: "sorry about that i cannot disclose any of company matter"

As I stated, I'm very disappointed, as I see this as a false economy. If you state 24x7 support, that should mean proper support, not a holding operation from somewhere remote.

Hopefully someone can clear this up and let me know how things run there, as I'm keen to sign up if the support is right.

[Tekorium]

I've just heard that Gator offer 24/7 telephone support.... which of course means that Live Chat is only a backup for serious issues. That's not a problem then.

I just need the assurance that if/when our server is down (or whatever) there is someone there to field the question and sort it for us. There's nothing worse than the site being down and not being able to contact the host.

With that satisfactory response, I will go and open an account.

[vodafone]

I believe that there is nothing wrong for a company to outsource its support dept. In fact I believe that even some big companies have their support center located in parts of Asia ie India.

If big multinational companies can do it, why not a non-multinational companies. As for the kind of support person you are getting ie knowledgeable or not, that I believe has nothing to do with where the support person is located. Its more to why wasn't this person trained properly or why couldn't they find a more knowledgeable person.


* I'm in no way affiliated with hostgator nor is their client. Just happen to come across this post. Moderator, please delete this post if you think its inapropriate

EDIT - typo

[GatorBrent]

We have one minute monitoring on all services on all servers. Any time something on a server goes down we are alerted to cell phones and email almost instantly.


Chat support has power to contact a system administrator 24/7


Most companies don't offer chat support and there’s a very valid reason. Many people waste your time chit chatting about their life. Rather then tie up experienced admins who could be working on serious issues we outsource chat to provide a better service to all. Phone and ticket support is done in house.

[Tekorium]

Fair enough everyone... but don't blame me for being paranoid... there are so many bad hosts out there it pays to be over cautious.

A week as a customer and there are no clouds in the sky at all. The setup was swift and professional, the sites load quickly, and I am sitting on 100% uptime at the present. We requested a couple of extra IP addresses and had them sitting there in place within hours.

We actually use over 40 different hosts... and I have to say, I can count on one hand the number that have matched HostGator during their first week. If this is how it stays, I'm gonna like it here!

[GatorBrent]

We'll have downtime count on that. =)

All hosts do, but the difference is we are at working fixing the problem within a minute of it happening. Thanks for the kind words!