As you may have already known, I used to work in a web hosting company as a customer support representative. Although the team was pretty small (there were only 8 of us), we managed to answer the questions from a 200,000+ customer base. This is quite impressive from a business point of view. However, in the customer’s point of view, it could be a nightmare…

During the time I was in the company, we only provided support service via email. There were no real-time support such as over the phone or online chat. There were only 8 of us and we did our best to keep the turn around time under 24 hours. In some difficult cases, it took 48 hours to give an initial response to the customer. So when you submit a support ticket to us, you will need to wait for a day to get an initial response and most of the time the response is just some copy-and-pasted templates which is not really helpful. You will then ask for further help and wait for another day to get the 2nd response. It is not unusual to take a week to resolve a case. Some extreme cases can take up to a month.

Besides the customer support service, we were always being complained about our email services. A lot of users have experienced hours of delay in receiving emails. A lot of times, emails that are sent to popular servers such as Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail were blocked. The delay was mainly due to the email firewall server being overloaded with large volume of emails. The firewall server needs to check each incoming email for possible SPAM and viruses. Because of the large volume, it takes a long time for the emails to get through.

So how should you choose a web hosting provider for your website? Besides picking the lowest price with the best features, I think you should test their customer support first before actually signing up. Send them an email, start an online chat, or give them a call if they provide a toll free number. If they don’t give you reasonable and timely response, then you can go to the next company. Also, you should ask them what their refund policy is. If they allow you a full refund within a month, then you can test their email system too. If you find that a lot of emails are delayed or being blocked, then you can ask for a refund.

I am currently using Bluehost for my blog, as well as my business website. It’s been almost a year and so far I haven’t experienced any major problems. There are some small issues such as website being down for a few minutes because of server reboot. But I don’t find this too serious because I know there are some limitations in a shared-hosting environment. If you are still looking for a web hosting service provider or if you are having major issues with your current one, then you can give Bluehost a try. They have a 30 days full refund policy which should give you enough time to test it out.