Presales questions and purchasing hosting

Introduction

Nice imaginative subtitle huh?  Well, imaginative or not, there was a need for an introduction, mainly to express a few of my own thoughts on the matter at hand.

As you might know by now, when making buying decisions I value very much the information coming from people outside of the hosting company (namely customers), my main reasoning being that, in order to close the sale, a company's sales representative might conceal things or even lie.

Despite that, presales questions, whether by email or other means, do provide valuable information to us as potential customers. Note that the presales questions are to be sent to the sales department, not to the support department.

What's the purpose of presales questions?

Sending an email with presales questions will give us, the potential hosting customers, the opportunity to measure things like how fast the response is, how correct the answers are, the level of detail given and the attitude towards the customer.

Often times, as I already noted in the "Testing Support" article, the response coming from the sales department is not as rapid as one coming from support. Some of the big hosts with many employees go as far as not to answer sales inquiries during weekends, although support for customers is available during that time.

With that said, as a general rule, responses from the sales departments to inquiries made by email should not take longer than 24 hours. Obviously the sooner the response comes, the better.

Note that this article comes as a completion to the rest of the things that I wrote so far, so there are things that I do not detail or even mention here, but are presented in detail in other articles of mine.

Steps to be taken

A first step should be to send an email with a few fairly basic questions. Things that are general, and yet fairly important and potentially incommode, like "How long have you been in business?".

The first email allows you to introduce yourself and to see what's their first reaction. Do they want your business or not? Do they answer your questions carefully and in detail or just skimp them? Are they polite? Do they use English the right way (spelling and grammar)?

If they pass the first email test, meaning they've done a good job on average (there are no clear grades here) then a second email makes sense.

In the second email you could ask them if their features include everything that is necessary for your website to work. It's especially important to let the host know things about your website: what scripts you use, what's the programming language in which they were written, how many simultaneous visitors you have on average online at a given moment, how much bandwidth your website consumes etc. Very busy sites can be resource intensive and are no longer suited for a shared environment. They need a server of their own.

Of course, if you're just starting you have no statistics, so it's all going to be a guess work.

An important note: try not to ask questions which have already been answered on their website, as the host might not want your business anymore. Lazy, inattentive customers are generally not desired. It might come as a surprise to some, but yes, businesses choose their customers too.

Despite what I said earlier, it could help to include one or two questions that were already answered on their site, to see if the staff knows its job well.

More emails should be exchanged if new questions arise from the discussion. Some, those who feel comfortable over the phone (I don't, I'm too shy ) and live close enough to the host to easily afford a phone call, should contact the host by phone too. Emails work great, but some things can be weighted a lot better on the phone.

Things to ask

There are things that are good to know about the host. For that I've created a list of questions. Also to be noted is the fact that the tougher the questions you ask, the more respect you usually get from a good host and the less interest a scammer has to keep answering your questions. Knowledgeable people are not exactly their market target.

Now here are the questions with some explanations that I felt necessary:

1. Do you have uptime statistics from a third party monitoring service like Alertra or some others? Please give me a link where I can view them easily.

A good host keeps track of its servers' uptime to verify if the uptime guarantee was respected, to be notified when downtime happens and to defend itself when customers wrongly complain about downtime (when perhaps it was only a local ISP's issue).

Two things are also important here: how often the statuses of the servers are checked by the monitoring service and how long is the history of the uptime records. It's one thing to check the servers once an hour and one thing to check them every five minutes. The more often the checks, the more accurate the uptime records.

Also, the longer the history, the better. It's one thing to know that a server had 100% uptime for a month, a goal which is rather easily attainable, and another to know that it had let's say 99.95% uptime in the last two years.

Also note that some hosts have "in house" solutions for monitoring their servers that don't allow an easy way to make the reports public. Other hosts have had unpleasant experiences with third party monitoring and/or found the service an unnecessarily burdening expense, so not having public reports from third party monitoring services, is not necessarily an attempt to hide something.

2. How long have you been in business?

Web Hosting is an industry and like in any industry experience has to count for something. Two things have to be separated here though: there is corporate experience and individual experience, meaning that there are businesses that have been in active a long while and are thus experienced, and there are new companies started by very experienced people who have worked in the industry for a long time. In both cases experience is an asset that they do possess, just that in the second case it's harder to actually prove it.

3. How many employees do you have?

A high number of employees often means higher dependability, meaning that the chances that the host will disappear over night are slimmer. Don't forget though that the answer to this question is only a claim which is almost impossible for you to verify.

4. Do you outsource sales/support or is it all "in house"?

Quite a few hosting businesses outsource part or all of the support or (less often) sales. Depending on how well things are organized and how professional their manpower suppliers are, things can work out great or be a total miss.

The reasoning behind outsourcing is to lower the costs which often is translated into lower prices for the customers too. It's a way to be competitive. There are hosts doing very well with outsourced support and hosts who failed at using this avenue effectively. This is also true about hosts having all their staff "in house" though.

Nevertheless, it's a good question to ask. A host openly recognizing "we outsource" is sincere and I like sincerity. It goes hand in hand with honesty.

5. What's the expected time for initial response on support issues and what's the average time until final resolution?

Pretty much self-explanatory. You can't really see if they speak the truth or not, but you can compare your "live results" to what they've claimed and see if they spoke the truth or not. Remember, the purchasing decision is not final. It never is. You need to keep testing things and always watch out for signs that things might be slipping out of hand.

Also note that the automated answer machines and the email autoresponders shouldn't be counted as "initial responses". They're just automated confirmations of message receipt and nothing more. They convey no information.

6a. Are you selling from a reseller account?

Many hosts will frown once they read this question. It's one of the most dreaded questions that a potential customer can ask a host that sells from a reseller account. Some hosts, even those that are not selling from reseller accounts, will argue that the reseller status of a host has no meaning, that it's the level of service that characterizes a host as good or bad. I happen to agree, but only to a point.

Unfortunately the reseller's business depends on the quality of the service of the upstream provider. In the attempt to maximize profits, too many resellers go for bottom of the barrel hosts that turn out to be less than OK, especially in the long run. When the server is down, the reseller can only ask for resolution, not act effectively.

6b. Who's your host?

This is the question that resellers fear the most. I warn you, don't expect them to give you an answer. The question is unfair and it's all too natural for them to refrain from sharing this information with you. If they tell you who their provider is you could just go there and get (in theory) the same hosting service, only cheaper. Whatever effort they've made to lead you to their website (meaning advertising) would then be wasted.

7. How secure is my credit card information? Convince me that I'm safe to use it.

8. Do you have your own datacenter?

Most hosts that market shared hosting, rent their servers from big providers who have datacenters. A datacenter is a major investment. It makes a lot sense for a regular host to rent servers until the business grows to a certain size. For some hosting customers this added layer (datacenter-host) might not be to their liking, the reasoning being that the host depends on the datacenter's staff for some things.

9. What means of contact do I have, as a customer, to get in touch with your support team?

The most common means of contact are email, helpdesk, trouble ticket system, forum, phone, instant messaging (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger etc.) and LiveChat. Generally the more they are, the better, for redundancy reasons.

Phone support is thought by some to be a sign of seriousness. I do think that a business - any business - should have a phone number, but not necessarily for support. This is the Internet, there are plenty of other ways to contact the host. The phone number might be used only for sales, or emergencies, or other business related purposes.

10. Do you offer a moneyback guarantee? What are the conditions for eligibility?

I've discussed the moneyback guarantee in more detail in the "Moneyback Guarantees" article.