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It was long overdue whether you accept it or not. There is no guarantee for anything in life apart from death and this rule applies to the web hosting industry as well. Check out any web hosting package and they will spare no pains to educate you about the quality of their services in general and their server’s uptime in general. However no web hosting provider will guarantee a 100% uptime. There has to be a MTBF (mean time between failures). After all even the exhaustively planned projects of NASA faces glitches. Compared to them the web hosting industry is chicken feed.
Downtime & Support
Even the best among web hosting organizations will assure their clients something like 99% uptime. This means that there is a possibility of 1% downtime per year. What do you do when this failure takes place just while you are planning to update your website just before mission critical and find that the control panel is not working? There might be the occasion when updating your website immediately is extremely vital and if you fail to do the same immediately, you might stand to lose a huge sum of money. Under these circumstances would you prefer your call to be routed to some other country?
Customer Support
Let us assume that the person sitting on the helpdesk at some city on the opposite side of the globe is well educated and is well equipped to reply back to your query immediately, but what about language and accent issues? There have been countless occasions when customers face problems trying to get across their thoughts to someone who is not familiar with their accent. Not only does this leave both the client and the support staff exasperated, the solution to the problem is not achieved. The web hosting industry is a time critical one and requires personnel that one can get across to immediately.
It needs to have personnel manning the helpdesk who are familiar to the accent of the client and can respond back to them in their same accent. However, the industry, in order to save some bucks, out sources the job to a helpdesk in some other part of the globe. Make no mistake. There are no discriminatory issues over here. But the fact remains that the owner of the web hosting services is in a big mess as far as customer support services are concerned. Web hosting by its very nature is global… there are no fixed countries… a web hosting agency might well have clients and servers across the globe?
Does this mean that they should employ offices and help personnel all over the world?
If they did, it would not be cost effective. If the American client finds it difficult to understand the accent of the Indian helpdesk personnel, the Indian end user of the web hosting services also finds it tough to understand the remedial measures the American staff manning the helpdesk wants to convey. Having an in house staff consisting of technicians from different parts of the world might help.
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