Compare customer support

Listed below are comparisons of the many ways web hosts deliver customer support.

• Live chat: this is increasingly the support option of choice for web hosts, however responsiveness and helpfulness varies markedly between hosts; some web hosts, e.g. Heart Internet, Fasthosts, etc., only appear to make live chat available at certain times;
• Ticketing: many web hosts, e.g. GoDaddy, Bluehost, HostGator, etc., no longer allow customers to submit support tickets;
• Phone: in some cases, this appears to be the primary, preferred or only support option for certain webs hosts e.g. 1&1.
• Remember: organizations dedicate resources accordingly. The resources dedicated to sales chat are unlikely to be equivalent to the resources dedicated to support chat;

Some analysis:

• GoDaddy discontinued ticketing support in 2014 after likening its status as a method of support to the “cassette tape”. We disagree and so do, we suspect, the people across the world who collectively account for sending 269 billion emails every day;
• We experienced disproportionately high live chat wait times across most Endurance International Group hosts (e.g. Bluehost, HostGator, Just Host, etc.). We also suspect their live chat funnels into one place – one Just Host chat operator ended our chat by stating “thank you for contacting Bluehost”.
• Some live chat operators, particularly EIG hosts, are guilty of what we refer to as “chat buffering,” or the process of typing meaningless platitudes into a chat to, we suspect, make it easier to balance incoming enquiries;
• We’ve waited over 10 minutes to receive a response from Hostinger’s live chat operatives (we gave up at this point);
• Siteground is probably the best host we’ve reviewed for customer support – they dealt with our support tickets in less than eight minutes and their live chat is very responsive.
• 1&1 doesn’t appear to offer ticketing or live chat for support (they provide the latter for sales). Rather, they emphasize their phone number at every opportunity.