Best Web Hosting Services for Customer Support

When choosing a web host, you concentrate thoughts mostly around the general offer. Often web hosting support ends up at the very bottom in your list of requirements. However, it’s an essential aspect of web hosting due to the technical nature of the services. Sooner or later everyone needs assistance, so you’ll be better off selecting a web hosting with top-notch support along with other benefits.

What Makes the Best Customer Support for Web Hosting?

First of all remember that customer care is not only about resolving technical issues related to your website. You may also need help with something else such as billing or you have specific questions related to the service that can't be found online. Oftentimes web hosts split their support to address different issues. Questions usually fall into one of these three categories: technical help, billing assistance, and sales advisory.

Technical Support

The name speaks for itself. This group of web hosting support agents takes care of any technical problems you may have with your website. They are usually available 24/7, since websites go down regardless of time of the day. They deal with urgent and pressing problems like hardware or configuration-related server issues, performance drop down or migration services. Regular maintenance and updates of the servers are also on the list of their responsibilities.

Billing Assistance

If you need help with your payments, bills, refunds, or other things related to money, they will take care of that. But these specialists may only be available during the standard working hours.

Sales Advisory

When you have questions about the services, ponder on upgrading a pricing plan or feel like you need additional web hosting features, you’ll mostly talk to a sales representative. They should know everything about the best products and will advise you on what fits best according to your business needs. Though, you should be careful to avoid unnecessary upsales.

Different Support Channels

Further, web hosting companies handle support in multiple ways.

Live Chat

Live Chat is usually the fastest and most convenient way to reach out because you can expect an instant reply. Often it is oriented for sales which might be useful when you are just figuring out pricing plans and want to dig into details. Providers also use chat bots. If set up well, they can sometimes help you right away or connect you to the right person of the web hosting support department, depending on the nature of your question.

Ticket Systems and Email

Ticket Systems and Email is a standard web hosting support practice. Everything is kept simple here: you submit a ticket in a query-response system or just write an email describing your problem. Then the support team processes it and responds, which can take anything from minutes to days depending on the difficulty of the reported problem, agents’ workload and web host’s support quality overall. Our list features reliable and responsive hosting companies, so you can safely make your choice based on our recommendations.

Phone

Phone Support is a life-saver when you encounter an urgent or complex issue. It provides a way to get immediate assistance, regardless of the time of day. Although, in many cases web hosts offer phone support only for premium pricing plans, due to the expenses involved. It’s up to you to decide whether an emergency line is worth the extra charge.

How We Rate the Support of Web Hosts

We have created a questionnaire that we have presented to the hosting providers. These questions are very different in depth and difficulty to answer and have accordingly taken different weights in our evaluation.

When testing the support teams of web hosting providers, we evaluated the following:

Quality of Response

We calculate the quality of response as the number of questions successfully answered by the support teams divided by the number of questions asked.

Response Timeline

We further evaluate the response time based on the time it took them to answer our questions. We staggered this across several types of support questions so that, for example, urgent questions were scored differently than questions that were just about providing general information.

Available Support Channels

We check in which ways (live chat, ticket/email, phone) the web hosting support can be reached.

10 Best Web Hosting Services for Customer Support

How to Choose Web Hosting with Great Support?

Choosing a web hosting provider that will satisfy you in every way is not an easy decision to make. You have to find the middle ground and balance multiple important factors like performance capabilities and security with the level of customer support that you need. If you are not a tech-savvy person, then you will certainly benefit more from great support than a person who can self-help with anything, at least technically. Choosing a provider that scores well in our support ranking and in other areas that are important to you will result in a great solution for you.

If you feel like you don’t know where to start yet, check our overall Best Picks or try our Finder Tool to identify solutions that meet your requirements in every sense.

If you are at the stage of final reasoning, then our Comparison Tool will help you to compare services side by side.