Just the other day I saw a company bashing other hosts for not having a toll free support number. I guess when you are on the bottom you will bash anyone for anything you can ge your hands around.But this hit me hard because we do not have a toll free number for our clients so I wanted to explain why.We do not hae a toll free suport number because it is just too expensive. We certainly could if we were charging $40 n hour for support like Yahoo or $200 a month for a shopping cart like Volusion.com.
A toll free number costs about $6 an hour for US calls and with the average user requiring more than 1.5 hours of support each month that is as much as we charge for hosting. Add in the cost of the time for that support and hosting services then subtract that from the $10 we charge and we would be losing $20 per month per account.As we built this business we realized if people wanted support, they should cover the cost of the phone call. Since the vast majority of people have unlimted plans it is not even an issue.We feel that if someone wants to pay $200 a month we will be happy to give them everything, but most people do not want to pay that much and we want to keep the cost down for everyone. If you need 10 hours of support in one month, we cannot pay $60 for a toll free number when we only colect $10 from you.It really should make sense to everyone that is in business and if it doesent then we do not want the people on our system.We have grown to realize that people we ask for an 800 number tend to abuse it and if they are too cheap to have an unlimited phone plan then they are usually too cheap to pay for website hosting services.Any real business will not grip about paying for a phone call to ge free unlimited help with their business, especially when they are only paying $10 a month for the service.The fact that you can call us and get help when we only charge $10 a month is insane in itself. The average support call is 45 minutes and that time is not cheap to be speaking with an expert. Since I get $200 an hour for programming services, that is very cheap to get my advice. For anyone to grumble because we do not have a toll free support number is just annoying as hell.Most of our customers would rather pay $10 a month for service and a phone call whe they need it rather than $50 a month every month even when they do not need help.It's a trade off that everyone is happy to make.Working with toll free numbers has taught us that they do not increase profits, they increase support issues and tend to attract customers that are just too cheap to pay for phone calls. We don't want to deter anyone from calling but we do want to deter people that do not have an extra few dollars in their business website budget.We get people constantly that want to build the website first then pay for it. They expect to call spend hours with us on the phone and use our servers and bandwidth and support and not have to pay for it until the site is live. These people are too cheap to pay $10 for a website but they want our time and money for nothing. Not having a toll free number tends to weed out those cheapskates.Look, we know our product is so far under priced it is insane. What we ofer is worth $300 a month or more and we do it for $10. You can't get half of what we provide for less than $100 from any company, so not having a toll free support number is not much of a detrement.
What we are saying is that if it bothers you, you are probably not the right fit for our hosting service and you would likley be much happier with something in the $2 a month range which will better fit your budget.
We really want customers that understand it takes money to make money and realize we are saving them a bundle by cutting our overhead. Why should you pay more so someoe else can get free calls?
|
|
|
