Have you ever had a pressing emergency situation and then called the only person able to save your neck, only to be have your call answered by an answering machine?

Frustrating is not quite the word to use to describe the situation. But the truth of the matter is that this is exactly the situation with many web-hosting services. Ridiculously, even as web sites have rapidly developed to incorporate the very latest state-of-the-art technology in all aspects including areas like billing and marketing, the back bone of web site management, namely web hosting has mainly remained in the stone age.

Web hosts have been mostly small one-man operations run as a hobby from some basement somewhere on a part time basis. Although this is changing as more and more serious ecommerce web sites emerge. However, it has not been changing quite fast enough.

A lot of hard work and investment goes into generating traffic to web sites. Imagine all that hard won traffic being unable to log in just because of some minor technical problem that makes the site inaccessible. And then to make matters worse, you have to leave your problem with some answering machine not knowing when you will be able to get some attention to your crisis.

It is quite welcome that some web hosts these days, apart from having their phones being answered by real people, also offer multiple options for people to get in touch with them. Some hosts even now have a new feature on their web sites where a client can send an instant message to their technician’s pagers. Now that is what I call service.

And about time too. The number of people whose livelihoods directly depend on the performance of web sites is rapidly rising these days and it is only proper that good service and support services are offered by web hosting companies.

Luis Perez works for a web host whose phones are answered by real people.