Which hosting providers to avoid in India

Creating and maintaining a website is the most technical task which you will encounter in your lifetime. The year is 2022 and bloggers and entrepreneurs need a website. So it is the local business owners and small brands which bear the brunt of hosting providers in India who do not maintain an optimum level of services.

Three things essential for hosting provider

• Strong technical infrastructure – The design of your data centre and implementation of the server software which powers the hosting service are the two main pillars of any hosting business. These software are complex, created by multiple vendors and regularly updated. Some companies maintain such a strong infrastructure that there is no need for customers to even call them, because admins never face a problem. More about this later.
• Customer care which listens – Maintaining a website is a daunting task even for technically qualified geeks. So imagine you are confronted with an uncaring and annoying customer care. Being polite will not help here. You need solutions and all you get is unpolished Queens English. Not to mention the staff shortage and waiting time.
• Power to you – During the pandemic and subsequent lockdown, small business were looking for ease of business and working with constraints like 50% manpower cuts. Now when you login the hosting account, imagine restrictions and limitations. A badly designed and planned interface will create more problems for you, new ones.

Avoid resellers at all cost

There is absolutely no advantage provided by a reseller. I have seen so many brand owners buying hosting from resellers saying that he or she is my friend. The reseller story is short-lived and ends up mostly with problems to you.

Maintaining a reseller business requires advanced skills and it is not a single person venture. So until you want to really help someone or you know someone good, stay away from small hosting providers.

The technically helpless customer care

Many hosting providers outsource their tech to outsiders. This greedy behaviour ultimately puts the customers in trouble. Here is unfolding of one tale.

Trouble begins after this particular hosting provider marks a saved credit card as inactive. The domain name cannot be renewed. The site admin misses the email prompt informing that the domain has not been renewed. After the site goes down they contact customer care. One possible solution is to add another credit card. Other solution is initiate a domain transfer. But because the domain name is expired, they are not ready to display the EEP code. First pay and then we shall cooperate. Because the customer care has no idea on technical matters, they have to place a request with the tech team and wait for a response for upto 72 hours!

This hosting provider has just one payment option. Credit card only. It is only after you contact customer care, they give you a link for Paypal. The client finally paid through Paypal using the same inactive credit care. The domain was renewed, site was live and then EEP code provided by email. This is perhaps the only hosting provider which does not display the EEP code, they only send it by Email.

The long waiting time

So this bot keeps you waiting for about 50 mins till it has to be woken up again. But this is so wrong. Let us understand why.

Hosting providers made huge profits during lockdown

There were entire companies and business which had to shut down during lockdown. Take for example of hospitality and tourism industry, the worst hit. But along with the IT industry, it were the hosting companies who made tons of profit with business growing multifold. The entire hosting business is work from home, it has been like that since it began. So there was no excuse for hosting companies to work with reduced staff and longer customer care waiting times.

One of the top hosting company of India is facing one such problem. A strong technical infrastructure, top of the line offers and products, great tech and tons of payment options, all so user friendly. But the one thing that they need to work on is customer care. Why I have the feeling that they are not going to invest there.