‘Live Chat’ for Better Customer Service

Herein lies the tale of a customer of mine who, with all the best intentions, took out web hosting with a cheap and cheerful UK provider who advertised to host their website for less than £50 a year. A bargain you might think and so it was, for a while, until things started to go wrong.

Now to save embarrassment and and legal shenanigans I am not naming the client or the hosting company but if you are hosting your site with a cheap provider in order to save a few pounds, read on.

To all intents and purposes the website was working fine and all was well in the world. However, a bombshell was about to hit. Without warning the site went offline. The first thing my client did was to try to contact the hosting company. That’s when he found that a) they did not answer the phone b) there was no weekend support at all and c) they had no live chat.

Eventually my client did get hold of someone and it emerged that his site had been hacked and was infected with malware. The person at the hosting company promised to ‘escalate’ the issue to a higher priority. What happened next? Nothing that’s what. The next bombshell that my client discovered what that to his amazement and mine, this well known UK host did not take back ups of their hosted sites. That’s right, no back ups so there was no possibility of taking a former non corrupted version of the website and restoring it to the server. This really created a major problem. Despite more phone calls and more promises from the hosts, nothing happened.

The outcome was that my client had to have his site completely rebuilt at a significant cost and moved to a new hosting company and all because he had been drawn into a cheap, but essentially sub standard web hosting deal.

So if you are getting a cheap deal somewhere I strongly suggest you check;

1. Is your site getting backed up automatically

2. Does your provider have adequate support if something goes wrong.