When you are searching for a new web hosting company you must evaluate a ton of different features and factors in order to finally choose the new home for your website. The quality of the support is by far the most important factor that must weights the most in your final decision. It is possible to evaluate the offered support by asking many pre sales questions. If they don’t respond in time, or even worse, if they don’t respond at all, then search for another web hosting service provider. If their answers are short, not enlightening, general and raise more questions then you have another clue why you must not register with the given web hosting firm. Imagine, if their presales department sucks what will happen when you will need real support! Theoretically, presales personnel is the most well trained, friendly and capable in order to make a good first impression and finally to persuade the perspective client to register with them.

Another important aspect of your web hosting quest is to ask before you choose to subscribe with a web hosting company all those questions that are related with the platform that you will host at your account. If you are using for instance content management systems (CMS) like Joomla, Drupal, CMS Made Simple you must be absolutely sure that your web hosting provider meets all those requirements in order to run these applications with efficiency and security.

Another very important criterion is to investigate if your future web hosting company has 24/7/365 online support. Phone support is not yet a commodity for web hosting businesses, but online support through chat and email should be provided. Note that the support must be truly continuous and not let the client to send a message and then wait for a response after hours. Support tickets and forums are also fine to have, but the big difference is done when there is quick and efficient response.

It is true that most web hosting companies outsource their support to countries of undeveloped world in order to cut expenses and gain a much larger profit. This has many drawbacks. As competent they may are the fact that they don’t speak your language as you may sometimes annoy you. No one likes to receive answers full of grammatical errors. The problem is that web companies don’t search enough for the best, because there are many qualified individuals with excellent studies, background and English fluent. These kinds of people of course demand a higher payroll and as we already said most web hosting companies are only concerned how to cut expenses.

I was always delighted when support personnel were doing the extra mile in order to assist me. I remember the times when I had problems with establishing a mysql database due to personal incompetence, the support team not only answered all of my questions promptly, but, without even asking it, they went and create the database by themselves! This is what I call support! They did whatever was human possible in order to please me. They know that when the client is pleased they will not ever abandon them even for a new company that offers the same for a much lower price.

The most important lesson that every webmaster should learn is that good support is the most important and decisive factor for choosing a web hosting company, staying with it or unsubscribing. Remember, web hosting is a service, not a product and the support plays a crucial role.