On the fence with WHB

[ahmadfarhan]

OK, so here's the deal.

I was shopping around for a reseller package and after a while I found WHB. The price was good. And the WHB website looks like it was written by someone with some technical expertise (as oppose to some webhost that fills the page with marketing buzzword.)

BUt I am rather on the fence here. I read reviews all over the web, some good, some bad. WHich is no big deal, of course some customer complain more than others, but what I see that is as a recurring pattern is that support staff that are technically uncapable. With most resposnse being some form of "please call the tech guy".

Which is a stark contrast with how the website is written. Even my chat sessions with the presale support seems like the staff is just giving me links back to the main website for more info.

I don't know, i guess my question is. Is all your support staff untrained in technical aspect? or did i just met a few bad apples? or is it SOP to redirect technical stuff to the tech people (what is the work of the support if not help solve customer's technical questions, this is after all a web hosting company)..

[Alan B]

After reading all the reviews and lots of comments, at some point you must choose a host. I'd say that this one is worth choosing. Yes, they have had some back luck recently with some bad hardware and a persistent DDoS attack, but of course these can happen to any host. Generally the staff here try to do the right thing and to satisfy the customer.

There are various levels of support here, and sometimes more complicated issues get passed up to more skilled techs. That can seem like passing the buck, and may take more time, but they want to make sure that the best people work on the toughest issues. Most of the time it works pretty well.

For the quality of the service here, the price is very low. I'm actually a proponent of having WHB raise the prices substantially, to better reflect and help maintain the excellent support. Until then, you get a good deal.

Note: I am not WHB staff. I am a reseller client.

[squinky86]

ahmadfarhan: I have found that yes, there are a few people that man the support queue who aren't very technically inclined, but when there's an issue, there is ALWAYS someone who is technically knowledgeable who is able to work on your problem within an hour. I have had all my technical requests answered within an hour (such as cron needing to be restarted on a server, or permission issues), and more involved tasks usually get handled before the day is over. It depends on what your site needs as to whether WHB will be right for you. If you go with out-of-the-box sites and default options, you should be just fine. If you're doing very custom applications, this is where I've had some issues that take a very long time to sort out (for example, the InnoDB problem that the staff is currently working on- I see that root is logged in and using midnight commander, screen, and top to try and figure out what's going on with the DB errors).

When you need help, Matt R is generally on these forums every day, and he is DEFINITELY a technically-inclined person. Vladimir and Dennis I have found to be very helpful with technical issues, and Alexey (spelling?) is a top-notch system admin. I know I'm missing some, but the point is that there are many people who know what they're doing, but they are working on the more important task of supporting their customers and putting out fires. I know I don't have experience with all the support staff, but once any of the aforementioned people start working on an issue, you know it's going to get resolved.

[Matt R.]

Yikes, my technical skills are nowhere near on the levels of Dennis, Alexey, Vlad etc...

Our live chat is designed for simple level 1 sales and technical questions. It isn't economically viable to have 3-5 x system administrators online 24x7 just to answer more complex technical tickets. Plus I don't think many system administrators would be willing to do this.

Our goal for helpdesk tickets is 60 minute response times and we generally achieve this. Occassionally the more complex issues do take longer but we are revamping our escalations procedure to iron out the occasional delay with a complex issue.

One thing to note is that our live support team has been running 6 months. I think we've lost (though leaving/firing) just 3 people which is pretty low for new department of this size. This means that the team is learning and developing very very fast. We've invested heavily into training this team. We do have a requirement that for anything that requires account or server modification that a ticket is submitted, purely so we have a record of this.

[Hosting Reviews]

Hmm, I don't know any sysadmins willing to be stuck to a computer answering live help. They are always in the backend willing to help when needed.