We recently sent out an invitation to rate us on our performance to a few thousand people — we didn’t send it out to new customers because we wanted people to have a chance to experience us a bit more before reviewing. We only expected 20 or so people to respond because let’s be honest, surveys are a pain. We all get them constantly and they just annoy us — so seeing a few hundred people answered ours was amazing!
Normally survey results are kept fairly confidential — however, we were stunned by the results so we wanted to share with everyone. Usually you won’t see companies release survey results because they are always negative, companies send out surveys to figure out “What’s wrong” and “Why sales are horrible”. We don’t feel that way at all, however customer needs are always changing and we want to make sure we’re supporting our customers as much as possible…… and now to the results:
First off, we’re extremely happy to see the majority of people voted us “Excellent” in all categories — that is outstanding and we couldn’t be more happy.
As we expected, speed was the lowest rating (insert sad face here). As we pointed out a few months ago, shared web hosting isn’t for every website out there. If it’s a personal website where you store pictures and use for email, you won’t have speed issues, if it’s a small business website that you run, shouldn’t be a problem either. Slow speeds come into play when you’re running multiple sites with database-driven applications (Huge blogs, forums, chat servers, etc).
In most cases, when you notice speed issues, it’s usually not due to the server being overloaded (even though that has happened due to various reasons in the past, it’s unlikely), it’s usually due to you running out of your own CPU/memory restrictions we place on each account. We do this, not to make you mad, however to protect the server and protect the other hundreds of clients on our servers. However, as we allow for each website to use “up to 10%” (not to be confused with use 10% constantly), a few bad apples in the hundreds of accounts can really slow things down, all it takes is 6 or 7 accounts and the server is running on 30% CPU idle for the rest of the hundreds of accounts, not really ideal. We do our best to make sure our server’s are always monitored and they page us as soon as they notice CPU issues so if it comes to that point, we fix it before it becomes a major issue. We recently released VPS plans (both budget — for those who are experienced system administrators who can need a VPS for a low-resource project, and enterprise VPS’s, which are for high end websites (high end blogs, forums, etc) who don’t want to upgrade to a dedicated server but want the benefit and speed of one.
However, our servers are getting a little bit of upgrade in the next few months (starting with the first one tomorrow, actually). Each of our US servers has 12G of ram, we are upgrading all of our Phoenix-based servers to 24G of ram, doubling the amount of things we can keep in cache. This will help increase speeds greatly across the board. Some of our EU servers already have 24gigs, we’ll be rolling it out to all of them after we finish with our Phoenix-based servers.
The next survey question was regarding communication and how often we communicated with you. Sometimes I feel like we communicate too much with you so I’m glad we asked this question — the results were not expected. We’ll continue to send updates as much as needed — hopefully in the future, customers can check what kind of communication they want from us (outages, maintenance’s, features, etc) and so they only receive certain emails from us if they feel we’re sending too many.
The next question related to how we notify customers, we’re glad phone wasn’t a favorite. It would take a long time to call thousands of people anytime we made a change — and we’re nerds, we hate talking on the phone!
The question related to referrals was a huge sign to us we’re doing the right thing — in most cases, you don’t refer other people to services which you aren’t happy with, therefore we’re very happy to see the results of that poll
As far as ‘What could we do better?’ this was a comment box with lots of comments — most of them say ‘Nothing, you’re doing a great job’ which is awesome! However, I wanted to publicly address on the blog:
Concerns about our terms of service – If you are a newer customer of ours, you might have no idea what we are talking about here, but maybe 8 months ago, we completely re-did our terms with our lawyer and he wrote up about 25 pages of “lawyer-speak”. We thought it was a good idea due to recent events at the time, however we received a lot of negative feedback about it. We decided to change our terms a few months back to make it much easier to read — therefore, for those who complained about our terms, we invite you to check out our new terms and let us know any feedback you have! It’s best to contact us directly regarding terms questions/comments.
Concerns we are getting too big and service will decline – Every big company has this issue, either they grow too fast and can’t support things or they start going cheap on things to make more profitable. We’re doing our best NOT to become those companies, we’re not a fan of these “mega web hosting companies” that have millions of customers and 1000′s of employees because to them, a customer is nothing. We’re growing at a steady pace that gives us the ability to not have hundreds of employees and we still try to treat each customer like they are a part of our family. I hope we never lose that feeling as we continue to grow. If it wasn’t for the customers, we wouldn’t be here — as people grow big, they forget that very thing.
Coupons for existing customers - The majority of our coupons on for new accounts only — this is pretty standard across most web hosting companies. However, after reading some of these comments, we’re going to change some things up and start offering limited-time coupons to existing customers to encourage them to bring their additional accounts over to us. When this happens, we’ll make sure to announce it!
That’s about it — we greatly thank each and every one of you for taking your time and answering our survey.
