Nowadays, just about every hosting provider claims to be the “best” provider out there. A simple Google search for “best web hosting provider” will yield thousands of results. So what does it actually mean to be the best? Is there really a best provider out there? To research these questions, we took to Web Hosting Talk to try see what it really takes to offer the best hosting services on the market.
To our surprise, just about everyone lists the very similar reasons for “being the best”. Common explanations include offering true 24/7 support, utilization of the latest technology available (typically CloudLinux + Litespeed), SSD storage, etc. This really brought two things to mind: First, that we must also be the best because we already have all of this. Secondly, and more importantly, is how could there really be a best provider if everyone’s just offering the same stuff? What used to be differentiating factors for leading providers are now just the industry norm. So how do we really expect to stand out from the pact?
This year, we are performing a major overhaul of our service offerings in order to stay ahead of the competitionand to ensure that we really live up to our promise in offering the best hosting service available; not just the industry-standard. While we’ve got a long list of initiates in the pipe-line to help us achieve this goal, we did want to highlight just a few that clients have to look forward to.
More Staff, More Support, More Service
Dave wrote a post just last week introducing a few of the new key members that we’ve brought on board to help out. If you haven’t seen it yet, make sure to Meet our New Hires. In these past couple of weeks, we’ve actually tripled the size of our team here at Fresh Roasted Hosting and we’re not stopping just yet! We’re also going back to our roots and changing the way that we interact with our customers. To do so, we’ve launched an internal re-training campaign for existing staff and introduced a new four week training regiment that all new staff participate in before they join our customer-facing teams. We want to make sure that our clients experience the most friendly and reliable customer service on the market.
In addition to the new training programs and additional staff behind the scenes, we are launching a new ticket feedback system this week so that clients can let us know how well we do. With this new system, as a support ticket is completed and automatically closes, a quick feedback request form will automatically be sent out so that you can tell if there was any way that we could have done better. We’re so committed to hearing from our clients that we’re offering a $1 service credit for each ticket feedback sent in to us!
Increasing our people-power and customer satisfaction are just the first two steps. Within the next few months, we plan to use these additional staffing resources to offer technical assistance over additional channels and to make technical assistance more readily available for all clients 24/7. Accordingly, make sure to look out for the launch of bothphone support and live support later this year!
New Location & Upgraded Hardware
In addition to the our commitment to offering the best customer service in the industry, we’re focused on having an industry-leading infrastructure to back it. We are currently in the process of undergoing a major overhaul of our back-end. Most notably, we’ve just recently added an additional location for hosting services – South Bend, Indiana. Located next to one of the busiest network peering points in the United States, this new Midwest location allows for equal network performance throughout the entire United States and Canada.
If you’re a techie like us, you’ll be excited to know that all servers at this new location are on Cisco and Foundry Networks systems backed by a full multi-gigabit and sonnet networks. We’re also utilizing several carriers meshed together through Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to ensure that we deliver connectivity to almost every major network backbone in under 5 milliseconds!
As if that’s not enough, we’ve invested heavily in all brand new enterprise-gradeequipment to run out of this new location. Our minimum server specifications for our hosting services in this datacenter are Dual Intel Xeon E5-2690v3 2.6GHz servers with 32 GB DDR4 RAM and Intel S3500 Series Solid-State Drives with RAID-10.
New Technology & More Features
To complement the customer service and infrastructure upgrades, we’ve got a ton of exciting new features scheduled to be rolled in to production over these next couple of months as well! One exciting new offering to look forward to is Dedicated MySQL Hosting on Solid-State Drives for all Shared and Reseller customers! This will improve our already ultra fast hosting services by not only allowing additional resources for intensive MySQL queries but ensuring that heavy MySQL usage does not impact your website load times at all!
In addition to improved MySQL performance, we’ve been able to solve many of our technical challenges through partnerships with specialized providers in their field of expertise, such as BlackLotus for DDoS mitigation and SpamExperts for inbound and outbound spam and virus filtering. More details on these offerings to come soon.
Our determination is to ensure we are best provider of great value hosting solutions in Central Pennsylvania and a market-leading brand that is synonymous with great customer service.