Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Your Hosting Support
Overview of Web Hosting Support
Web hosting support is related to providing continued and timely assistance and support to let your websites, servers, application portals, etc to run uninterrupted round the clock independent of traffic. Such an approach is very much essential to ensure the timely delivery of your support and services to the end users.
Outsourcing your web hosting support enables you to direct your energy, resources, and time to your core business functionalities. But as with any outsourced support, web hosting support also has its share of benefits and shortcomings.
Taking an in-depth dive into the necessity, advantages, and concerns of outsourced web hosting support by involving all the concerned stakeholders can enable you to identify a support provider that maps best with your requirements and organizational policy.
Let’s now see the pros and cons of outsourcing your web hosting support.
Pros of Outsourcing Hosting Support
1) Leverage the Services of Expertise Staff through Hosting Support
By outsourcing your web hosting support you can leverage the services of some of the best expertise and trained personnel. Hosting support teams have industry-proven tools and mechanisms that offer a quick resolution of technical glitches, thus providing you an upper hand in the competition with your peers.
2) 24 by 7 Hosting Support
Outsourcing the hosting support to reliable third parties ensures better delivery of your services like web portals, online customer service help desks, live product information, etc. If your operations are spread across multiple locations, robust hosting support enables you to address your customers no matter what time of the day it is. Service providers also use Artificial Intelligence (AI) based capabilities to provide automated and personalized responses to the customers thus drastically reducing the service latency.
3) Hosting Support Can Ensure Better Uptime for Your Services
This is one of the most important benefits of hosting support. Uptime refers to the time duration during which you can provide uninterrupted services to the end-users. Uptime is something that cannot be overlooked irrespective of the size of your organization.
Hosting support provider can carry out site maintenance and up-gradation works without taking a toll on your uptime thus ensuring that your websites are able to handle your customers even during extreme traffic surges.
4) Hosting Support Facilitates Scaling of Your Services
Hosting support providers can upgrade or downgrade your services based on your business requirements. If there is a massive surge of traffic to your websites due to some applications becoming an overnight success, you might be required to upgrade your current support plan.
It is here that scalability becomes a linchpin requirement for hosting support. A company that starts small will scale growth and so do its websites as time progresses. Scalability enables you to upgrade your services without making any underlying changes in the basic infrastructure.
5) Hosting Support Saves Costs
Hosting support enables clients to offset their operations, maintenance, and labor costs. You need to make a lump sum investment if you are planning to have an in-house team for hosting functionalities. You need to find a well-experienced human workforce and procure licensed and expensive software and infrastructures. Dedicated third parties have state-of-the-art infrastructures that can address your requirements and provide you with a whole host of pricing plans.
6) Cross Technology Support
Most of the web hosting support team provides cross-technology support. Web hosting is a service that demands in-depth technical expertise as there are multitudes of technology and tools being used. There are numerous options depending on the selection of operating systems, databases, CMS, etc.
7) Better Customer Support
Customer support is one of the most important parameters to be considered while selecting a hosting support provider. The hosting support provider should provide tiered support based on hierarchy. Tier 1 customer support deals with basic customer concerns. Escalated issues from tier 1 will be dealt with by tier 2 customer support which comprises technicians. Tier 3 support consists of experienced engineers who can offer solutions to very complex issues.
Cons of Outsourcing Hosting Support
1) Roadblock to Transformation
You should work hand in glove with the hosting support provider who may be based on a different set of work policies and objectives that may not be in line with your organizational work policies. This can result in disagreements and nonconcurrence in some of the processes. You should ensure that both teams align on the same page and reach an amicable solution that is agreed upon by both parties.
2) Reduced Control Over Hosting Support Provider
Of course, you cannot intervene much in the day-to-day operations of the hosting support provider as opposed to the case in which you have a dedicated in-house team. The hiring procedure also won’t be under your control and maybe under the discretion of the management of the hosting support company. Also, a remote worksite location may further diminish your control over the hosting support team.
3) Hosting Support Service Provider may Compromise Your Confidentiality
Hosting support teams will have access to your underlying data and applications that may be sensitive and confidential in nature. They may be required to be provided with administrative privileges for gaining access to some of your applications. This may compromise your data and applications that demand foolproof security. Any inadvertent mistake on the part of the hosting support provider can badly affect your business operations and customer loyalty.
4) Compromise on Quality
The hosting support provider will be based on a quality policy that may drastically vary from your in-house quality policy. For instance, if the web host support provider offers customer support on your behalf, they may adhere to the set of templates, standards, and procedures they follow. Thus it is very much necessary on your side to ensure that you dictate your quality policy standards and customer reach-out strategies prior to proceeding ahead with the contract.
Conclusion
Having gone through the pros and cons of outsourced web hosting support it is quite evident that the pros take a clear edge over the cons. By outsourcing to the right provider you offload your constraints, shortcomings, and inherent gaps to a trustworthy partner who can bridge this gap and provide you and your customers the best service.
Web hosting support services help small and mid-sized enterprises to offload their worries with regard to functions like server maintenance, management, service upgrading to meet the varying business requirements, etc. A reliable hosting support provider can ensure uninterrupted delivery of your services to the end-users without having any constraints based on network traffic or uptime thus paving the way to better customer experience.
Activelobby provides hosting support services for our clients. We manage your servers around the clock. Our well-experienced team can troubleshoot your server-side issues and provide white-labeled technical assistance to your customers 24 by 7.
We deploy tools like cPanel, Plesk, Citrix, etc for web hosting services. We offer customized service packages depending on the client’s requirements. We help you to prepare a road map depending on your current servers, control panel, email accounts, etc. Our industry-proven practices ensure that the process is executed with minimal latency and downtime. Our in-house disaster management and recovery services guarantee the safe upkeep of your data and applications.
We had accomplished cPanel to DirectAdmin migration for a client who is one of the top five web solution companies in India. We also helped clients with the migration from the Free panel to cPanel. We offer customer support through live chats, helpdesk engagements, phone, etc. We use tools like Skype and Whatsapp to communicate with our clients. To know more about web hosting support services please do visit our website.
