If you’re a web hosting reseller and you’ve ever had a flood of support requests from your clients at 1AM on a Sunday morning because a server is down, you know how awful that feeling is when you can’t reach your hosting company to resolve the issue. Your only recourse is to submit a support ticket and wait (sometimes up to 24 hours) for a response. Meanwhile your customers are growing angrier by the minute and there’s nothing you can do. Unfortunately, that’s the way a great many web hosting companies function as it has become an acceptable way of providing technical support to web hosting customers, even those who’ve signed up for reseller hosting plans.

Obviously it’s much cheaper to simply reply on a web based ticketing system or email. Web based systems and email based technical support are a critical part of any hosting company’s technical support operations.

Sometimes a web hosting customer will have a login/password issue, need some help with a piece of code or have some other issue that requires actual text be sent back and forth between the client and the tech. In other cases, the issue at hand may simply not be that urgent and the customer does not require the immediacy that phone support can bring. Without a doubt, every serious web hosting company must have some type of web and/or email based ticketing system to serve their customers.

But let’s return to that Sunday morning crisis again. You’re just about ready to turn in for the evening, when you start to receive a flood of urgent emails from your customers telling you their sites are unreachable.

What recourse do you have? Well. you can submit a support ticket like your supposed to and pray that someone will be there to answer your plea right away. But really, you’re at the mercy of your hosting company and their queue based ticketing system. Looks like it’s going to be a long and frustrating night.

Here’s another example. What if one of your customers is suddenly experiencing some strange intermittent database issue that you can’t diagnose yourself and you need to get in contact with your host. You send a ticket in describing the issue as best you can and even in a best case scenario with a hosting company that guarantees a ticket response time in under an hour, you get a reply from the tech asking you for your client’s IP. You send that in, wait another 45 minutes to an hour before receiving another reply from the tech informing you that the ip is not being blocked, how about performing a traceroute and sending that in now? You see where this is going. Many frustrating hours of back and forth with a tech support agent before your relatively simple issue is finally resolved.

Imagine now, the same scenario, but instead of using the ticketing system, you can just pick up the phone at any time of the day or night and reach your hosting company’s tech support department via a toll free 800 number. Within a matter of minutes, you’ve explained the situation in detail to the tech and he has offered a solution. Your customer is back in business and you can get on with your life. It’s a beautiful thing.

While every hosting company must have some type of web based ticketing system to serve their customers and resellers, 24×7 toll free telephone technical support is a crucial resource for anyone who is serious about web hosting and in particular, reseller hosting. If you are a reseller and your clients rely on you for their online businesses, then toll free phone support is absolutely essential.