Support and the role of your hosting provider
As hosting providers, we at HOSTAFRICA are often challenged in our role as hosting provider, especially with regards to support.
Our role is our focus…
We are here to provide hosting space to our clients. At HOSTAFRICA, we give our customers a hosting space as cost effectively and as streamlined as possible. Our focus is on providing a reliable back-end service for clients. We try to keep things as simple as possible so that our systems can interact as seamlessly and as fast as possible.
To do this, we are constantly writing back-end automation, checks and monitoring systems and keeping up with the latest developments in virtual hosting. As a result, we can provide a rock solid platform to host our customer’s servers and websites on. To be cost effective, we need our systems to work well and to deliver the performance our customers pay for.
This in turn keeps the support desk less busy and enables us to apply lean management principles to minimise overheads. By not offering managed services, we can keep our services streamlined and cost-effective.
The Reality of Support
Even though we do not provide managed services, we do assist our customers when needed. Working as a well oiled IT machine on our own systems does not always mean we can fix issues not related to our hosting systems.
We try to be helpful and can often point our customers to a solution. Unfortunately, we cannot afford to implement and/or maintain end user software or systems as from a practical perspective and a resource management point of view, it is not a sustainable, scalable growth model.
We go out of our way for our clients is in solving more general issues that do not involve coding or end user applications. Issues involving mail abuse, DNS, advice on effective fire-walling or passwords. Guidelines with regards to best practices and best-of-breed solutions. We assist with installing our core systems such as Plesk or cPanel. We also assist our clients with the initial installations of products. These include RDP Licenses, MS SQL Server, Office for Servers and SSL Certificates and advice on Linux systems.
The Result
We focus on our main systems and assist as far as possible only with our own product set. This enables us to maintain an effective and friendly support team. They do not have to be mediocre generalists, but rather expert specialists able to really make a difference. At the same time, we can focus on what really matters – keeping our customer servers running smoothly and efficiently. 
Happy Hosting 🙂
