How to Accurately Measure the Customer Support Level of Your Small Business Web Hosting Provider

If all things being equal, we would rate customer support as our most important determining factor in choosing a web hosting provider. Relying on testimonials found on the provider's site is the most common approach to assess a company's level of customer excellence but it is also quite an outdated one. Afterall it's not uncommon for some providers to fake the testimonials. Instead we suggest you follow our way of intelligently assessing its customer support.

Customer-Employee Ratio - Sizing its level of customer support is sometimes as easy as finding out whether they have enough employees to support their level of business growth. An easy way to do so is to look at the customer to employee ratio, CE ratio, as a benchmark.

For example, according to our records Sitesell has approximately 15,000 customers and employs about 30 support staff, it has a CE ratio of 500 (15,000/30 = 500), you can expect a much higher level of customer satisfaction and a faster response time when compared to another provider who is serving 100,000 customers but only have 75 support staff. Their CE ratio would stand at approximately 1,333. Basically you should look for a professional hosting provider with a low CE ratio.

Number of Telephone Lines - Check to see if there is a separate line for sales, billing and technical support. We hate companies who use only 1 line to serve everyone. Either it is a company with very limited resource or it's immediate priority is simply not their existing customers but new customers.

An Active Forum - The real condition of a web hosting company's customer support is really found in its members forum if any. You will get a good dose of complains and praises but if the complains outnumber the compliments, it's time to raise a red flag. Forum is possibly the most effective way for you to get as close as you can to knowing a company's strength and weakness without committing to any contract with them.

Cynthia is the webmaster of Small-Business-Web-Hosting-Guide.com, you can discover even more but often overlooked ways to determine which is the right web hosting provider for your small business by subscribing to her free web hosting newsletter for all small business owners.