Well the bell has sounded. I’m done with ixwebhosting.com as my webhost. Frankly, their customer support is awful. It puzzles me that they are marketing themselves as the “business choice” for web hosting and yet their service is definitely not of business caliber. I guess if you’re a business that is just looking for a simple html page to give basic info on your business you’ll be okay but if you’ve got dynamic content running on your website - ixwebhosting is definitely not a good choice.

Over the past year and a half I put up with slowdowns, outages, and email problems as the normal “costs” of a cheap shared hosting plan. But the last straw for me was my experience in the past week. Here’s the breakdown.

1. Over the weekend (March 27-30, 2008), ixwebhosting.com moved all their servers (and customers) to a new data farm. I was warned well in advance of this move via email and also warned that this would mean downtime of about 48hours. There was nothing wrong with that - and they did their customers right by communicating what was about to happen. The move was done to put us on new servers and make things run faster and better - or so we were told.

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!