My experiences with my webhost (ixwebhosting.com) the last year (and especially the last few days) have been abysmal. Really the only reason why I’ve stuck with them is because I haven’t had the time to research and switch hosts. Now I do. Probably next week I’m going to be taking the plunge and transferring all my sites.

In my opinion, what makes or breaks a company (or any organization for that matter) is customer support. Probably more than ever - word of mouth matters - if you have crappy front line customer support it doesn’t matter how stellar the rest of your business is - your business/organization will suffer.

So, here’s my list of what customer support should be:

1. Don’t keep me waiting.
Whatever way you offer support, long delays mean I get unhappy. Don’t have an answer for the question I’ve asked - write, “we don’t have an answer yet but we’re looking into it” but DON’T say/write nothing. In today’s world more than ever, time = currency. I’m not just paying money for your product/service but I’m also paying time because there was a problem. You better balance out that time in coming up with a solution!

For some time I’ve been looking for a way to reliably backup all my personal and work related files on both my home and office computers that is as maintenance and hands-off as I can get it.? This “holy grail” of start-and-forget operability has been elusive…until now.

Why backups?

Quite simply - as any computer guru will tell you (or someone who’s learned the hard way!) - hard drive failure is not an if, but a when.? No matter how well a hard drive is manufactured it is still mechanical and subject to wear and tear.? Eventually it will fail.? Backing up your data is just plain smart if you don’t want to lose any of your hard work. It is something that is even more necessary in this age of digital media - who really wants to lose their years of photo memories, or that cache of mp3’s they’ve been gradually amassing?? If you don’t have a backup system - there’s really no time to waste and it should be the first thing on your to-do list in the immediate future.