Customer Support Wars: Comparing the best and worst hosting experiences

Which hosts provide the best customer experience and which ones would you be best to leave?

Any website owner knows that – despite best-laid plans and the claims of providers to offer 99.99999% uptime – hosting hiccups are an inevitability. It’s not a case of if but when something goes wrong.

That makes it all the more important that providers offer world-leading customer support so that when something does go wrong, errors are identified and issues rectified quickly.

Some companies are winning loyalty with near-instant, hands-on support, while others are losing customers to long queues, scripted answers, and aggressive upselling. So, who should you choose, and what experiences can customers expect to have?

Leading the way

An analysis of the best hosting providers when it comes to fixing things when they go wrong suggests that SiteGround still sets the pace. SiteGround advertises chat replies in under a minute and ticket responses within 15 minutes on average.

That feeds through to positive sentiment among customers willing to leave reviews online: 92% of about 10,000 Trustpilot reviews rate SiteGround ‘Excellent’, according to one analysis.

Premium WordPress specialists Kinsta and WP Engine deliver similarly fast 24/7 chat, but add deep CMS expertise, and WP Engine’s customers speak of “white-glove” service, though phone support is reserved for higher-tier plans.

Meanwhile, Kinsta’s front-line reps are support engineers trained in WordPress and Linux, with no tier-1 hand-offs, who routinely debug custom-code conflicts in real time.

Budget host Hostinger has long proven that good support isn’t reserved for premium prices. Hostinger advertises a 60-second average chat response; Cybernews’s own independent tests saw responses within about two minutes.

The company’s multilingual agents walked beginners through SSL installation without a sales pitch. Other independents, including DreamHost, InMotion Hosting, and A2 Hosting (rebranded as Hosting.com), are also worthy choices. DreamHost’s team just earned back-to-back Stevie® and Globee® awards – an indication of its pedigree.

Other options available

GoDaddy manages to balance scale with performance, with a 4/5 Trustpilot rating. Other cloud behemoths, AWS and Google Clou,d score high on reliability but low on human help – an issue given the rise of AI chatbots in customer service, and the propensity of tech companies to adopt future-facing solutions more readily than others.

If that’s an issue, it’s worth considering those with more of the human touch rather than the tech obsession. For startups that lack in-house sysadmins, the true price of “cheap” infrastructure can be panic at midnight.

The issues are likely to compound further as AI becomes more important. Hosts with millions of accounts struggle to staff skilled agents. Boutique providers offset smaller margins with high-touch service – a trade-off many businesses now prefer. That’s because some top hosts are thriving on chat-only models.

What to look for

Generally, the best-rated and performing services hire technicians who can actually troubleshoot; the laggards employ tier-1 script readers and outsource escalation.

Customers notice the difference when they need that support. You should also look at what you’re being offered carefully. True round-the-clock help means every channel – phone, chat, email – but some companies couch in their fine print that only a handful of routes are available all day.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that reliable hosting starts with reliable humans.

Customers are likely to wait for good service, but aren’t going to stand holding off for an automated response from a chatbot. That said, it’s important that responses come quickly. Anything over 15 minutes on live chat suggests a queue too long for comfort.

Before you invest your time, money, and business’s reputation into a single hosting provider, it’s important to do your research. Cross-check claims with Trustpilot, G2, and Reddit threads; patterns emerge quickly.