In my last post where I talked about my account migration problem, I touched on talking with Nick from HostNine via LiveChat.

What better time then now to report on HostNine customer service? Right?!?

Anyway, I submitted a critical ticket to HostNine and since I hadn’t received a response for a couple hours, I decided to try the Live Chat feature of HostNine.

My experience with Nick from HostNine was a great one. He was able to fix my migration issue during our chat session which I appreciate.

My only problem is the critical report I made was never answered in a timly manner. Of course, I only waited 2 hours, but I felt for a critical ticket (my site was showing another page on their server) I should get a response within 60 minutes.

Anyway, that being said, here’s the chat conversation I had. This log is EDITED to remove confidential internal information such as administrative names, my account username and password information, etc.

Duration of Chat: 28 minutes

Nick: Hello! Welcome to HostNine. How may I help you?
Me: Hi Nick, my site is still not loading correctly, even via proxy which usually shows corrects within an hour or so.
Me: hostninehostingreviews.com
Nick: what’s the username associated with that site?
Me: Is the RC ok?
Me: that user pass?
Nick: that user should allow me to find the correct one, so yes
Me: RC user: <REMOVED> PW: <REMOVED> - hostninehostingreviews is the problem act <REMOVED>
Nick: ok, and what node was it on before?
Me: not sure, it was in California, the one that had major outage problems with DDoS attacks a couple months back
Me: 64.62.137.225
Me: from domaintools
Nick: k
Me: Does this sort of thing happen often with the migration process? I didn’t know it would cause all of this. I expected to see the blue cpanel screen for a bit as IPs updated, but not seeing a different site on my page….
Nick: that just means that site was the first one created on that server, not sure why the default apache page isn’t there
Me: Yeah I knew that too, but for your customers that dont understand how servers work, they would come screaming about how they got hacked….
Me: really needs the default page setup there. heh.
Me: that dudes site is going to have a TON of 404s…
Me: from my tests
Nick: … and fixed
Me: ahhh
Me: thanks, loads here
Me: now, I take it, this can happen any time I go to migrate an account?
Me: I certainly hope the TX server is better… had major problems at California
Nick: well, did you leave the migrate account window open & on top until it said that it was finished?
Me: yes I did
Me: got the message that the transfer completed and everything… but took a long time..
Nick: wierd, because the account never made it to the texas server, i had to go grab the cpmove file from the calif. server and restore it myself
Me: it was probably that CA server, that thing was offline a lot just look at my October results on that blog.
Nick: there, fixed the default page too
Me: I’ll continue my reporting. Hopefully things will turn around for December!
Me: Thanks Nick, I appreciate everything
Nick: not a problem
Nick: Thank you for choosing HostNine. Have a wonderful day!
info: Chat session has been terminated by the site operator.

Nick seemed to have other customers during our chat session because responses took quite a while between each and every response I made. This conversation should have only taken around 15 minutes or so to complete, but it took me 28 minutes.

The end result though is Nick was able to fix my issue during the chat session. I’ve had other experiences like this with other hosts and it took MANY chat sessions and MANY tickets to get a severe problem resolved. So HostNine was a blessing with this chat session.

In all, I grade my support request a B+. I can’t award an A because they didn’t respond to my ticket fast enough to satisfy me. If they had responded to that ticket, it would be an easy A-.

Thanks HostNine for fixing my issue!

Today, we decided to give their live chat sales support a trial run. By that, we mean, we started an actual sales question support request via live chat.

The results? Astounding!!

You can visit their live chat by clicking on one of the many live chat buttons located on the HostNine site.

Just type your name, email, and the right department, and you’ll be on your way to chat!

After the first window, we watched the time very closely and began recording the time 5 seconds after clicking “start chat” to allow time for the new window to load. Here is the conversation log:

Chat start time Sep 15, 2007
Chat end time Sep 15, 2007
Duration (actual chatting time) 00:02:37
Operator Nick

Chat Transcript

info: Please wait for a site operator to respond.
info: You are now chatting with ‘Nick’
Nick: Welcome to HostNine. How can I help you?
HHR: Hi. How many servers do you have available in this new reseller panel?
Nick: we have a map here: http://www.hostnine.com/reseller-central/
HHR: Excellent. Does that show countries as well?
Nick: yep
HHR: Great. Thanks Nick!

It took 20 seconds from the time we saw “info: Please wait for a site operator to respond.” to ” info: You are now chatting with ‘Nick’.” 20 seconds is extremely impressive. We have waited upwards of 10 minutes with other hosts during our test runs. With HostNine, less than half a minute? You have got to be kidding me! We were very impressed!

It also took only 20-30 seconds between each reply Nick sent to us. The majority of the time was us typing our questions. This is a first for us! Usually we have our responses typed and then we wait… wait… wait…

For this experience, we have rated HostNine a full 10 out of 10.

Nick completely understood our question, answered it quickly and efficiently, and provided us with a link to all of the information we needed. It just doesn’t get any better than this!

Please note, Nick had no idea who we were. We only used HHR as our name and we provided a gmail email address in the contact form. We were treated as a regular, interested, sales customer. Thanks HostNine for the excellent experience.