Web Hosting Reviews & Ratings

September 19, 2011

Is Offering 24/7 Support as a Reseller Worth it?

Every web host operates around the clock.  Even the newest startups know that they need to find a way to provide this service.  The web itself doesn't sleep, after all.  Anything can happen at any time.

This is easy enough for a web host with a few dozen employees.  If you are a reseller, though, you are faced with a difficult question.  You do need to sleep.  So how are you to handle the 4AM hacker trying to take down your database?

There are a number of different approaches you can take to solving this, and none of them are inherently superior to any of the others.  Let's take a look at them:

First approach: Do it all yourself

This is probably the default that a lot of resellers will settle on, and depending on the nature of your client's site, this may work fine.  What will determine this is how likely you are to be poked at 4AM.  This of course depends on too many factors to list: how busy your client's site is, how likely he is to overreact (or under react) to problems, and the severity of the consequences to your client's site going down in the middle of the night are all among things to consider.  Note that you can setup some kind of automatic monitoring, though this is susceptible to the same problems.

Remember that if you wind up constantly being woken up in the middle of the night you're eventually going to get to the point where you have a harder time responding to problems effectively.  If you wind up being woken up many nights a week, or several times a night, then this probably isn't the best answer for you.

Second approach: Send them to the host

Remember that if you are a reseller, then by definition you aren't doing this alone.  What might be more effective, if you think you're going to have a lot of off-hour requests, is to establish a set of on-the-clock hours with your client and tell them to go directly to the web host if there's an emergency outside of those hours.

Some resellers might balk at this suggestion if they aren't telling their client much about the host you are using, but this is an example of why this isn't a good business practice.  Better instead is to make sure your client only uses them for emergencies, and to have them copy you on any correspondence sent to the host so that when you wake up in the morning you know are caught up with everything.

Third approach: Hire night staff

One last idea is to hire night help for your site.  This has a number of problems.  For one, you are incurring an extra expense, though in this economy you might be able to hire someone cheap if you find the right arrangement.  Then again, if they're working that cheap, you have to wonder how reliable they are, an important consideration since you're adding both an extra point of failure and one more communications node.  You're likely to get best results out of someone you already know and trust if you go this route.

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