When it Comes to Customer Service, You Get What You Pay For
When you purchase web hosting, you get two things: a platform (server, network, software, etc.) and service (migration assistance, technical support, best practice advice, etc.). The platform is cheap. Hardware is powerful and inexpensive. Network connectivity bought in bulk is peanuts.
What costs money is quality customer service. Is your plan a managed plan? Does it come with qualified technicians who will troubleshoot your unique business issues and resolve your problems? Does it come with technical advice and assistance you can trust?
Some new customers that come from the $5/month shared hosting world of massive providers and fly-by-night shops are surprised by the $49/month price of ServInt’s entry-level product. But these customers are used to web hosts that cannot offer the scalability of a robust virtualized platform, let alone the technical expertise demanded by fully managed products.
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You could save a few bucks with a budget host and spend countless hours troubleshooting your own server issues, or you can offload some of that responsibility on the support staff of a qualified web host.
At $49/month, ServInt’s entry-level hosting package is cheaper than most cell phone bills. But included in that price is the expert help and support most business owners need since they do not have an IT staff or sysadmin on the payroll.
Spending time trying to fix your server is time you can’t spend making money. So invest in a hosting solution that will save you time and allow you to get back to your primary business. It will pay dividends well into the future.
Hello Anthony,
Thank you for your comments. It’s true that historically there has been a gap in between ServInt’s VPS and Dedicated Server products. Previously we filled that gap with the SuperVPS, before other hosts were offering a guaranteed core on virtualized products. At that same time, however, our lowest dedicated server offering was $299 on a monthly basis. Therefore, $199 was bridging the gap between the Ultimate VPS at $129 and a dedicated server. Since then, things have changed–somewhat dramatically–as you’ve pointed out. Which is why, over the past year ServInt’s be redesigning it’s standard solution offerings.
This started back in the spring with the release of our Flex server products, and has expanded into our VPS platforms, and it’s not over yet. Check back in the new year for new high-end VPS products that will further fill out this segment of our product line. They’ll provide similar Flexability to our dedicated server products, but far more power and resource than our standard VPS Packages.
I’ve been online since the early 90′s, and obtained hosting around the same time for different ventures. I’ve been around long enough to know a little about hosting. There was a time when I used shared hosting as it was all I required at that stage, for the type of sites being built and the traffic they obtained. When I setup a forum that started getting beyond shared hosting requirements, I went looking for VPS packages.
Over a year or two, I had tried out several VPS providers hosting in the US. Every single one I had some degree of issue with, whether it was incompetence, over-inflating specs versus what was being provided, or poor equipment that had lots of downtime… until I decided to spend a little more on quality, and landed at ServInt.
I think my VPS days were about 3 years with ServInt. I had next to no real issues during that time. That was refreshing, knowing I could walk away for weeks and months at a time, and besides ensuring my bill was paid, I didn’t need to go near my sites. They were simply just working without issue.
So… that is the good. Nothing is perfect though. I had to walk away from ServInt at a point because your products have a huge gaping hole for what you provide versus the price you provide it. Yes, ServInt HDD are truly superior for disk I/O which makes significant difference. But when disk read / write is ok, but your websites need processing power, ServInt just couldn’t match the competition.
ServInt wanted $200 a month for a dedicated single core, when I could get the same thing from WiredTree for $100 a month. Same everything pretty much, even the quality of service provided was exceptional. So I had to change hosts to use WiredTree’s Hybrid package for a year or so, whilst my site was still less than dedicated, yet more than basic VPS, without paying a fortune.
Even today, I believe ServInt lacks this aspect. Ultimate VPS doesn’t give a full CPU core for use, with burst on top of that, needing Super VPS at ridiculous price when dedicated is the same price with far more resources. Not everything is about read / write with a hard-drive, which I feel ServInt have put a little too much into, and not enough into CPU for VPS allocation.
Just do a market analysis and you will quickly see that ServInt is starting to lack in the CPU offering area for VPS packages compared to other equally viable providers.
Though yes, I am also back at ServInt now, because I out-grew VPS and Hybrid abilities, and needed a dedicated solution. As such, knowing ServInt equipment quality, and in fact it was also I was getting way more bang for my buck, by coming back to ServInt for an entry level dedicated versus the competition. WiredTree just couldn’t compete in that area for the equipment provided.
So… using the very comments made above in this blog entry, if equipment is cheap, then maybe it’s time ServInt did a little more homework on such offering to close these holes. People like to stay with hosts, however; people aren’t stupid either. I changed because the financial difference was significant. 100% difference in my case, between taking up a Super VPS to get a full core at that time versus $99 at WiredTree for the same specs, including RAID10.
If ServInt had closed such holes and were a little more reasonable with such specs for the prices being charged, then I would never have left in the first place and ServInt would have still had my monies for those additional two years, or close to.
Customer service… yes, ServInt is exceptional. Saying that, I also got the same level at WiredTree as well. It was a much of a muchness. Whilst one can argue customer service is everything, when others are offering customer service plus better specs, then things change in my opinion.
At the end of the day, if a reputable provider gave me better specs with the same service, I would move. That is something I think all hosts should keep in the back of their mind, as it is a competitive industry.