Surprisingly good support from a hosting company – Worth Shouting
In 1998 I started a small (miserably) online business and had my first experience selecting a hosting company. Back then it wasn’t a big deal because mine was too small a company to have a lot of hosting needs and in those early days there was less competition between hosting companies. The only thing I was concerned about was having adequate storage space. Traffic wasn’t even a problem. Still, I ran into unexpected difficulties and soon learned that even very small companies have to worry about more than just disk space. The support was the detail he hadn’t considered.
That first experience made me a bit bitter because I learned that getting support from a company that doesn’t take this aspect of the business seriously can be like pulling teeth. It turned out that the company I first stayed with was located in someone’s home, a fact that was never revealed in the advertisement. The man was nice enough and he went to great lengths to accommodate me as long as my support questions occurred on weekdays between 9am and 5pm, his time. Even then, he didn’t impress me with his level of experience.
Since then I have been through no less than six movements, and until this last one, none of them were easy to tolerate. If I remember correctly, the second hosting company I tried had a tendency to go offline too many times, and attempts to get support were frustrating. An eCommerce site cannot afford to be available to customers only occasionally. At that time my business had grown a bit and I had become very sensitive to this aspect. It was a bitter experience and I stayed with the company for less than a year.
Then came a highly publicized hosting company that had gotten some good reviews, although I’m still a bit wary of the so-called reviews one finds online, and while the initial move went smoothly, I had ongoing problems with connectivity and, again, had a hard time getting support. For one, there was no phone support at all. Everything had to be submitted via a support ticket. This is pretty common, I’ve found, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with support tickets, unless they’re slow to address and there’s no alternate route to Support. Also, there was a very obvious language barrier which led me to believe that “Support” was located abroad. I’m certainly not racist, but I think it’s mandatory that both parties can understand each other for something constructive to happen. it was ugly
The next experience was horrible, more than any other, because after a few months of reasonably adequate hosting, the company I had moved to simply closed, without warning. This was bad news that spread across the internet and became a well-known debacle.
Jump to my most recent forced move. The host company I’ve been with for the last three years, I will say, has been a good host. He will go nameless because I have no malice towards him. I had to move because as an e-commerce site I am required to prove that I am PCI compliant to continue accepting credit cards over the Internet. This fairly new security measure is one I applaud, as it goes a long way in providing the buying public with the kind of strong and fast security that has been lacking until now, but because my hosting company was unable or unwilling to provide a PCI compliant environment, I was forced to find a new host. I imagine there are thousands of companies struggling to find hosting companies that fill this need, which is one of the reasons I decided to write this article.
I found TVCnet.com as a result of being recommended to me by McAfee Secure, a well-known company that provides online businesses with security scanning and certification. They told me that TVCnet.com was one of the few hosting companies they felt comfortable recommending. When I looked at the available packages offered by this hosting company, I have to say that I was not impressed. The packages are quite small, but the price is also very affordable. The BIG plus was that they obviously presented themselves as leaders in their effort to be and stay PCI compliant for the good of all their eCommerce customers. I decided to give them a try. My expectations were low until I called the phone number listed on the TVCnet.com home page. . . and I have the owner!
Jim Walker not only answered my questions, but he did so with candor, kindness, and enthusiasm. He did not oversell. In fact, he went out of his way to make sure he knew exactly what the company could do and what he couldn’t expect. There was very little of the latter. I didn’t keep him on the phone, he kept me. For over twenty minutes he talked to me and didn’t hang up until he knew all my questions and concerns had been answered. The result was that I signed up an hour later, through the online process. Still . . . She knew better than to expect an easy transition. There was a shopping cart that had to work, a Linkpoint gateway that had to work, and various other site functions, including installing my privately owned SSL certificate, that had to work just fine. I crossed my fingers and waited as Jim and his support team handed me all. I didn’t have to upload a single file. My entire site was moved from the current host to TVC and every script and application was handled with care and concern.
Yes, there were problems. My payment gateway to Linkpoint refused to install correctly and I was expecting this to take days to fix. But Jim, himself, stayed on it through the weekend without interruption until it was done and it worked perfectly. We exchanged dozens of emails (less expensive than phone time and email provides a record of the process that can be saved), and all I had to do was provide him with login information to various sources where I knew he could find the information he needed.
Jim doesn’t know I’m writing this article. I’m doing this because I’m simply blown away by the really impressive support — no, let’s make that support with a capital “S” — that TVCnet.com has given me. Others need to know about this company. Hopefully this article will make the road less bumpy for others who are forced to find PCI compliant hosting, and for someone with any type of website that you would like to be hosted by a smart, helpful and friendly company.
