WordPress is very popular. However, have you ever wondered which web hosting company provides the best hosting services for WordPress? Cheap web hosting isn’t hard to find, but finding quality web hosting is a much different store. Becuase of this, I had the bright idea to secret shop four of the more popular web hosting companies and evaluate the overall level of customer services they provided to me. I secret shopped HostGator.com, BlueHost.com, LunarPages.com
and iPowerWeb.com
. The results of this report will indeed help you with making a decision on which web hosting company you should sign up for.
To give you a summary of the results here are the scores:
HostGator.com
(1 = Poor, 10 = Excellent)
- Customer Service Rating: 6.0
- Level of Knowledge: 7.5
BlueHost.com
(1 = Poor, 10 = Excellent)
- Customer Service Rating: 10
- Level of Knowledge: 10
LunarPages.com
(1 = Poor, 10 = Excellent)
- Customer Service Rating: 0
- Level of Knowledge: 0
iPowerWeb.com
(1 = Poor, 10 = Excellent)
- Customer Service Rating: 3.0
- Level of Knowledge: 1.5
Click Here to download the full report available on PDF.
Overall Summary:
I was absolutely amazed with the level of customer service provided by BlueHost.com. The name of the sales representative I spoke with was Lonny and he absolutely had me sold on “hello”. Lonny was extremely knowledgeable and knew BlueHost.com services like the back of his hand. He was very professional, enthusiastic and motivated to help fulfill my needs in web hosting and was very perceptive of my situation.
In all secret shopper calls made, I projected myself as being just a very casual individual who had a basic Blogger.com blog with the interest of setting up a web hosting account for the purpose of getting a Self-Hosted WordPress blog up and running while also having the need of assistance with transferring or migrating the existing blog over to the new one.
Based on my evaluation, BlueHost.com compared to HostGator.com, LunarPages.com and iPowerWeb.com is the best choice. Their level of customer service, technical support and overall eagerness to help the individual customer by far outranked their competitors.
Sad to say coming from a guy who has been hired by HostGator.com as a freelance writer. But don’t get me wrong, HostGator.com did well in this cold call evaluation. However, they did not win and I only hope that they view this evaluation and take corrective actions towards improving. Honestly, I like HostGator.com; however, I am extremely picky about who I do business with.
Many people think I am crazy for paying double the price for domain names with Godaddy.com compared to registering my domain names with companies who have a more affordable price. The reason is simple. I am all about receiving excellent customer service. When I pay money for a professional service, I want to be respected, valued and treated with class. I want a mint put on my pillow, I want my drink constantly refilled and I want to be catered to. BlueHost.com exceeded my expectations while HostGator.com simply only met them. LunarPages.com didn’t take my call and iPowerWeb.com failed to meet my basic needs.
