But the consumer has to be at fault for choosing to do business with these 12 year olds. If you call the company to check on it and a lady answers and says to hold for one second, then says "Honey, it sounds like it could be a customer. Why don't you go into your room and take this call. Then come back for dinner" .....you may want to look elsewhere :)

lol, that's funny.

I always expect the following from a hosting company:
24-72 hours setup - I prefer them to verify the order than to just activate it automatically without checking anything.
1-2 hour HELPFUL response to reg. tickets
3-24 hour resolution to reg. tickets, depending on what it was about (if it was a simple question, I'd expect pretty quick resolution, if it was installing a module or something I'd expect a slightly longer resolution).
5-15 minutes HELPFUL response to emergencies.
15-30 minutes resolution to emergencies.

When I say HELPFUL response, I mean a proper response to your question letting yuou know what's going on, NOT "we'll look into it and talk to you later."

Thanks

MTBill, just curious how much you are willing to pay for these expectations ?What do you do when these expectations are not met?

I was just thinking, and one place that I know of, that gives this response time (even better then this), is a datacenter.

Usually with emergencies, you do not have to contact the company, they should be already taking care of it. But it can be impossible sometimes to resolve an emergency in 30 mins, unless you are willing to pay for that much redundancy. In other words, some things you list may end up costing you a pretty penny to truely get that kind of a response time, everytime.

Wojjie, but a datacenter is much more pricey. It makes sense for the amount of money that the data center charges.

I think, communication is the key. An issue does not have to be solved right away, but frequent status updates are important.

Chris

I agree with nsusa, communication can improve a situation dramatically, even if it hasn't changed much. It seems that the majority of stress that comes from having a problem with your website, is simply not knowing what's going on. We always try to be very honest with our customers here and let them know "this will be fixed in an hour" instead of saying "this will be fixed soon". It helps to stay away from such vague comments.

Brad, that is very true and I'm glad you do that. i actually just had this happen with my host two days ago. They were having some problems and did not (or maybe couldn't, i'm not sure) tell me what was wrong. It is so much better to know what is going on. I was not told until the problem was resolved. I emailed them and explained how it would be much better customer service to let people know what the problem is, even if its not immediately fixable. Let's hope they do better next time. Information really helps and allows everyone in the chain to let others know.