Best in Customer Service

posted by Farhan Mirajkar on June 5, 2012

Fresh Roasted Hosting was recently awarded the “Best Web Host for Customer Service” award from WebHostRankings.com!  In case you hadn’t already noticed the award on our front page, allow us to share it with you:

To say we’re very proud of this achievement is an understatement; after all, our entire business model is built on customer service (and, of course, coffee).  Customer service is what we do.  It’s at the basis of every decision we make and every product we offer.

We have a saying around here that really represents what we’re all about:  “At the end of the day, the only metric that matters is customer perception”.  Take a moment and really let that sink in.

We live by that phrase because it exemplifies everything we do.  It’s a catch-all criteria for every aspect of every decision we make.  From server uptime and network performance to pricing and feature set, it’s a direct reflection of absolutely everything we do.  If even one tiny aspect of our offerings is out of whack, it’s going to negatively impact the way our customers feel about us.  And that’s not good.

“Hogwash,” I hear someone thinking.  “This is all just feel-good lip service.  You’re a business, after all; profitability is your real goal.”

That’s fair enough, but it’s not entirely accurate.  We are a business, and we’re here to make a profit.  Any business who tells you that profitability doesn’t matter is patronizing you (unless they give away everything for free, of course).  But for us, customer service does, in fact, come before profit.  Let me explain:

You see, the web hosting market is currently over-saturated with web hosts.  I can’t tell you how many exist, because a few hundred new ones open up (and just as many close) every day.  Suffice to say, you can type any string of random characters into your browser’s URL bar and have a 1 in 4 chance of hitting a web host.  You can even find VPSes as low as $10 / year on eBay.

With discount web hosts around every corner, competition is fierce.  To compensate, many web hosting companies in a race to the bottom in order to out-cheap their competitors.  Unfortunately, this usually means cutting corners, and customer service is almost always the first to go.  Far too often, companies will either outsource their support to a low-quality firm, or will slash support entirely.  Many smaller web hosts rely solely on their owner for support — and since everyone has to sleep sometime, this means that your 3am support need might not get handled for a few hours.

Coffee cup with a heartFresh Roasted Hosting is different.  We decided early on — long before our first customer ever signed up — that we were going to head in the opposite direction.  For us, customer service is our single biggest mission.  Instead of taking a purely reactive approach to customer service, we’re heavily proactive.  We do everything in our power to make sure you won’t have to open a support ticket with us in the first place.  That means choosing a higher quality blend of bandwidth carriers.  It means choosing a higher quality datacenter, with redundant cooling and power systems.  It means using enterprise-class hardware for maximum performance and reliability.  It means patrolling our network to keep out the riff-raff.  It means doing everything we can to make sure you never need to contact us in the first place, because we love our customers.

The end result?  We’ve created a web hosting company where customers don’t have to worry about their sites going down.  And if the unthinkable happens, our customers know we’re on top of things.  It’s not cheap, and it’s not easy.  But it’s what we do.  And it’s why we do not and never will offer $10-a-year VPSes.  After all, the old adage rings as true for web hosting as it does for anything else:

You get what you pay for.

This award tells us that we’re doing something right.  It speaks volumes of the demand for affordable web hosting backed by our over-the-top support.  And based on the feedback we’ve received from our customers, it’s apparent that most of you couldn’t agree more.  I’m proud of our staff here in Harrisburg, along with the technicians at the datacenters in Scranton and Los Angeles.  Without each and every one of them, we never would have won this award.

Happy cupping!

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