What do you expect of an high quality hosting company?

Good day everyone,

I am a proud founder & co-owner of a Israeli hosting company. We offering high quality services such as web hosting, resellers, vps, domains, dedicated servers and even backup servers for a reasonable price.

In the past few weeks we decided to move towards the worldwide(most-part European) market and expand our costumers base and our high quality services.

Before we start offering services, we want to know from you, the "worldwide market" if you will, what do you except from an High quality hosting company?

Before you say 24/7 phone and mail support, don't worry, we got it covered

Thank you for your attention.

 

I would try to be the first member to answer your question.

Here are what I think at the moment:

1. Hardware is quite important. Whenever I buy a hosting, the first thing I would check is the limitation of the server and what kind of spec being used.
   You already said the company provide High Quality Hosting, so there is no need to talk about Quality.
   
2. Active and Smart Customer Service surely will make your company as favorite choice for everyone.
   You already said support is already great, so there is no need to talk about Support.
3. Reasonable Price would drive huge sales.
   The only one which you didn't specifically listed is the price of the services/products.
   Price is very important to gain lots of clients as much as possible. I do hope hosting company didn't set price as lowest as possible if they unable to keep the performance and the quality of their servers. However, if they keep the server running smooth and maintain quality, there is no reason not to do that. It is better to get small profit from huge clients rather than huge profits from only few clients. Each company has their own unique ways to survive. But the bottom-line is, they were trying hard to keep the customer satisfy with their services/products.
   If your company really goes online and ready to serve worldwide audience, I hope you could give us reasonable prices, terrific support and high quality hosting.

By the way, Welcome to DigitalPoint. We always happy to meet interesting people in this forum. It is rare opportunity to meet founder of company in this board. Hope you like this forum.

 

Hardware specs, good customer service and of course a decent price. High quality Web Hosting Company should reply/assist with my tickets/problem in less than 30 minutes. The support staffs must know what they were doing.
High quality hosting company should manage their own hardware.

 

I think there are 4 main things a client look for a web hosting company..

1. Reliable: The hosting should be reliable. The hardware, colocation etc should be of high quality. Well most of the poeple tries looking for reviews in different forums or blogs about a web hosting company. So a provider should be in business for a long time, (MayBe 1 year minimum). I know this sounds bad for many of the new providers (Like me), but it is true. By this way a client makes sure you won't close your service down after couple of months, So whatever you plan to make with your business, don't think about it so much at first, focus on your promotion, if you are not getting enough clients to make profit, thats fine for a start. Just keep patience, its all about patience (I learnt it the hard way).

2. Reasonable: The price should be reasonable. High price from the beginning may be a mistake if you don't have any good marketing strategy or strong team. I think a $3 usd minimum price would be reasonable. Do not have an "unlimited" plan if you take my advice, because people are smart enough these days to understand, there is nothing like "unlimited diskspace", But thats surely unpredictable, you may or may not get clients. I am not experienced enough to understand this psychology .

3. HQ support: Its the another thing, that a client looks for, Our job is to satisfy our clients. Make sure to focus on "Terms of Service" when you start marketing outside your locality, there are many intellegent people who can find loopholes and you will regret that, believe me. Make sure to maintain High Quality support for every customer. I saw many clients complaining about support of many hosting providers. Most of the clients expect their matter solved or answered atleast within 1-2 hour. I know its difficult if someone has a small team, but its a fact. If you don't focus on that, you may lose clients, and thats not all. The client you lost may post bad reviews of your company elsewhere which will harm your business more.

4. Quality & Stuffs: Obviously people will look for high quality service. Software, Hardware, with some good addons maybe for make it user friendly. If ypu are in this field for long enough, you will know.

 

I agree with all above comments, but that's for professional users. What is your target - professional, freelancers or both? Freelancers (mostly small company sites) are considerably larger number and are not heavy users, but they need a) ease of use and b) customer service for dummies.

 

In short
- 100% uptime
- Best support for your queries (and quick response)
- Best match for your need

 

Thank you guys for your kind reply's.

First of all, we are not a new company(established in 2003), we gonna be new outside Israel.

Support: We got the same support team for the low paying costumers and for the high paying costumers, no matter of how much you pay per month/year your'e gonna get the best support we can offer(by phone, by email and by chat) 24/7.
Quality: not 100% uptime, but at least 99.8%-99.9%+(by pingdom). we OWN all of our servers and hardware(same goes about our sales and support team, we are not outsourcing nobody!).
Prices: We never offered unlimited hosting and never will, not in Israel, and not in Europe/USA. Our prices(in Israel) start at 5.5$/ Were probably will offer different prices and packages worldwide.

 

Do you have any reviews for your services?

 

Of course, but sadly they are all in Hebrew. we got reviews all other the (Israeli)net, facebooks, Israeli hosting forums, Israeli seo forum and more .

I'm not worried about not getting clients, I've created this topic to fully understand that you guys are looking for(but it's really the same, hq web hosting with good support). I want that our abroad clients will enjoy as much as our local clients.

 

Some may disagree with me, but when it comes to a hosting company I believe it should target the country the hosting company is in. It's hard to develop trust being in one country with a hosting company which is located somewhere else. And vice versa. Mainly because different countries are governed by different internet, trade, marketing, etc. laws. It will be a pain in the butt for both parties to try to reconcile those differences. You can try, but I think eventually you may run into many difficulties. As an example: some countries have no laws regarding email spam. If you have clients from those countries spamming their website users, your company will get a bad rep as a result, because in your country there are strong anti-spam laws. Etc. etc.

 

You are correct, but, before we will start getting clients from Europe, we will open a new branch in Europe that will obey to the laws in that region.

 

I am a sales/marketing guy with very limited technical website skills. This morning, I totally screwed up an important page on my top website just when a potential big customer was due to check it out. My backup failed, so I called my hosting provider. They did not have a back up either (my site is extremely large) but the tech support guy looked at the code on the page, made a couple of tweaks and it started displaying again. This hosting company has my loyalty FOREVER!

 

Great company and very good tech guy!

About the backups on our side, don't worry, we are creating backups on a daily basis for all of our web-hosting/resellers clients(for free) and we keep it for 7 days(In every given time you will have 7 backups for your hosting account).

 

you are kidding right?
Dude, you really got lucky this time.

Ok, here is an example of why everyone needs to have their own WORKING backups at home. Check out: http://easyhosting.pw/
guy woke up, decided that after 5 years enough was enough, and boom. All sites, backups, data gone. No refunds. Data gone. Similar thing happened to hostrail, big stable company one day, gone the next.
Seems all too often this happens. You got lucky. But if your site was wiped out due to hardware failure, (or in one event the FBI confiscated entire servers hosting thousands of sites as they expected some of the files hosted there may be related to a hacker network) then what will you do without a backup?

Get yourself a backup that works.

As to what I look for in a hosting company? Well for one, it has to be a company. I am tired of this kiddie hosting, with the entire company vanishing overnight and I want to deal with a company that is a company, and ethically bound to do what is right for not just themselves, but for their clients.

 

Good uptime and knowledgeable support. Apologies mean nothing, they just cost money.

 

I ftp-ed my entire website down to a computer in my office and back that computer up regularly. That was the file I tried to ftp back to the website. It did not work and I amnot sure why as I use the same FTP program successfully all of the time to update pages to the website. What would you recommend to use to backup the website files?

 

What kind of site are you running? If you are running a dynamic site with databases or WordPress or whatever, you can't download everything (particularly the databases) with FTP alone.

Is your site running cPanel?

 

Instead of technical area, people look how consistent in providing excellent customer support, that's the hard part when your hosting company going established.

 

Yes, I have cpanel. It is an osCommerce based site, so a database is involved. Looking forward to any guidance that you can provide regarding back ups.

 

I always thought that with cPanel it is enough to backup and then download your database. That backup may not be compatible with other web hosting providers but it is sufficient for cPanel (if something happens to go wrong). And of course with the database one should regularly FTP all current folders and files.