Most people would like the chance to be able to pick up the phone and either praise or yell at their web host, but these days it it a fading trend?  The more web hosts I check out it seems like the phone option is not there or is so hard to find you would give up before finding it.

Honestly, for me as long as the Online support (either via e-mail, a help desk system or both) is great I could live without the ability to dial them up to make the same complaint.  Chances are your not going to get a quick fix for your complicated issues over the phone any ways.  What will the phone tech representative do?  They will put in a ticket for you.

For smaller web hosts who don’t have a lot of funds, having a toll-free number can become rather expensive with little or no payoff in the end.  By not having phone support you can also avoid those people (you know who you are) who call in about everything and anything that might be wrong with the web site they have.  So which side of the fence do you come down on?

Having issues with random downtime or errors with your web site, but every time you contact hosting support they say:

“Well, all is fine on this end - nothing we can do.”

If you find yourself in these shoes, what you need to do is paint a better picture of the problems when they are happening so they will have more information to work from when it comes to troubleshooting your mysterious issue. It really comes down to the fact that you need to help support so that they can help you.

Step 1 - Clear Your Browser History and Cache

Before making notes for support I want you to clear out your browser history and cache. This may sound silly but you would be surprised how many times it can fix the problem any hosting customer might be having with their web site. Often times, the browser is still pulling up old information it has saved to the “memory” if you will, and not going out to the web each time to look for the new information. You might also try to clear your DNS information too, but that is often only used for new hosting accounts with a new domain or hosting accounts that have recently had the domain name changed.

Step 2 - Record Your IP Address

First thing you need to do is make record of your current IP address. If you are unsure how you can find your IP address a simple Google search for “what is my IP” will give you several Online resources that should get you that magical set of numbers that you desire. If all else fails, just bookmark whatismyip.com.

Step 3 - Do a Traceroute to Your Domain

Now the next thing I want you to do is do a traceroute to see where the bottle neck might be. We covered the basics on how to do a traceroute a few weeks ago. For those of you still not sure here is the “quicky” version:

1. From the Start menu, select “Run…”
2. When the run box comes up, then type in cmd
3. When you get the command prompt, enter tracert yourdomain.com
4. Hit the “enter” key on your keyboard and wait.

That would be for Windows XP and Vista users. Apple users can find the traceroute tab under the Hard Drive icon > Applications folder > Utilities folder > Network Utility program. When it comes to Windows, some people are confused on how exactly to copy and paste the traceroute information into a text document or e-mail to support. The best way to go about this is to right click on the command line window (anywhere in the black part) and select “Select All”. Then to copy, hit the Ctrl + C keys on your keyboard. Then you can right click with your mouse, and select paste to paste it into your text file you are saving this information to.

Step 4 - Try View Your Web Site via a Proxy Service

Now that you have that information collected, I would like for you to try to view your web site via a proxy service. This checks your web site from another server’s location from somewhere else in the world. If you can’t pull it up from the proxy service or your own regular browser experience, there may be something wrong on the hosting side. If you can’t pull it up on your PC but you can pull it up via a proxy, there might be a few thing wrong. It could be:

• A Network Issue Between Yourself and Your Service
• Your IP Maybe Blocked from the Server
• Might be a Problem on Your ISP’s Side of Things

Here are a couple of proxy services to try:

http://www.megaproxy.com/freesurf/ or http://www.proxify.com/

Do these suggested things each time you notice the problem, and this way you can paint your hosting support team a better picture of what the problem is. This is no knock on the hosting customers out there, but sometimes they don’t realized that a tech support’s best chance to get a problem fixed is having tons of good information passed along so we can recreate the problem on the server side of things.

If that can happen, and they can rebuild the events from the information you pass to them your web site will go back up a lot quicker.

From coast to coast, and all around the hosting world we all have times where we contact support and they say that nothing is wrong. Today I’ll show you how to paint a better picture for support of your hosting problems as well as…

Well a lot more hosting podcast goodness right here on this week’s edition of the Web Hosting Show.

Download the Web Hosting Show, Episode 148!
Running Time: 16 minutes | File Size: 7.10 MB

Here are just a few topics from this week’s episode of the Web Hosting Show.

• DemoWolf Introduces Subscription for Flash Tutorials!
• Learn to Gather the Right Info Before Contacting Hosting Support!
• cPanel Releases a Virtual Private Server Edition?
• Find a Web Host that is Perfect for Your Blog!
• Hosting Spotlight Shines on Dan “W3Counter” Grossman!

I really do appreciate you listening to episode 148, and this week we have tons a various content on board and ready to go so that you too can learn to become a better web hosting guru. From experts to novices, everybody is welcome because I think all can get something out of today’s broadcast.

With the new year here and not much else going on, this makes for the perfect time for web hosts to review their support pages and see what needs to be improved on.

Traveling from web host to web host looking for news and information I see a lot of people who don’t do much as far as support pages go. On the other side of the scale, you also have hosts that push out so many support pages that there is no way they’ll be able to keep them all up to date.

How Do You Find the Problem?

Check out your web site statistical information (one of my favorites to use is Google Analytics) and with your support pages see where you are getting the most hits. Now navigate yourself to a few of these pages and see if there is anything that could be improved on or updated.

Another thing you could do while support might not be so busy is to surf around your support pages to make sure there are no broken links. Now these are sometimes harder to find - but the worst thing you can do to a customer looking for help is lead them to a dead end.

Is There an Easier Way?

Now with both of those suggestions out of the way, we can make your job easier. How can you do that? Well, time to include a link leading to a contact form at the bottom of each of your support pages saying something to the effect of:

“Dead link? Out of date? Send us an e-mail and let us know!”

This will give your customer, clients and visitors a way of contacting you to let you know you have some work to do. Getting even a little more fancy, you could setup a special address for this and have it forward over right to your designers or a specific part of your support team so they can get these fixed as soon as they come in.

One question that I get from a multitude of web hosts is, “Are there any alternative methods to tech support that you know of?”. With everybody doing the standard e-mail, help desk and live chat support, people are looking for an alternative to give them an edge over the competition.

After sitting here and giving it some thought, I thought about the things I check on a day to day basis and one solution stuck out like a sore thumb screaming for attention. Twitter would make for an excellent web host to client conversation tool. Read more »

I got an e-mail from a Web Hosting Show listener last week who wanted to know if I had any points or tips for web hosts as far as their web site content and layout goes? Looking out there at the market today from web host to web host a lot of the web sites are starting to look the same.

To keep things simple, I thought I’d break this up into two topics. There are the things that web hosts need to do and then you have the things I’d like to see web hosts do as far as their web site layouts go.

Layout Tips Web Hosts Must Do

• Comparison Between Web Hosting Plans
• A History of Your Company and Details About Your Server Locations
• Reviews of Your Web Hosting from Your Clients

Layout Tips Web Hosts Could Do

• Better Support Pages (Maybe Use a CMS like Joomla or WordPress)
• Notifications (via RSS) of Recent Changes, Downtime or Upgrades
• Easy Way to Access Support from the Front Page

All in all hopefully once a web host is done with their web site they can say it stands out from the rest and doesn’t look like “just another template”. Web hosts, if your looking for something different you can do - just try mixing things up a little ‘bit. Look at the competition and don’t do what they are doing. Individuality is an important key to running a web hosting business because without that your just another generic choice to the consumer.

Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 115!

It is time for the masses to look ahead in PHP support and development and move towards using PHP 5. Now I am not alone in my opinion - it seems that is the growing opinion of the masses out there. So what is the hold up all about then? Well, there is some PHP 4 support dropped with PHP 5.

Since it might break some PHP 4 web applications out there, not everybody is in a hurry to upgrade from PHP 4 to PHP 5. That much is understandable. I think if we really want to see a change we are going to have to push the web application developers to think ahead - and not the web hosts.

One good place to check out to read more about “fighting the good fight” for PHP 5 is GoPHP5.org.

Here is a ‘bit of information from their mission statement on the front page.

PHP 4 has served the web developer community for seven years now, and served it well. However, it also shows its age. Most of PHP 4’s shortcomings have been addressed by PHP 5, released three years ago, but the transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5 has been slow for a number of reasons.

If you want to learn more about the debate, I would suggest checking out GoPHP5.org for yourself. While your there, if you are looking for a web host that supports PHP 5.2 or greater - check out their ever growing list of choices you have out there.