FAQ
Why doesn’t BlueChannel publish hosting plan prices?
Answer: If lowest possible pricing is your primary concern when shopping for a web host, BlueChannel is likely not a good fit for you. We charge more than large web hosts like GoDaddy, 1&1, and Network Solutions. But remember that lowest price doesn’t mean best value. Mass hosting farms overcrowd their servers to be able to profit at bargain pricing. For our customers, server reliability, bundled website maintenance, and real-person US-based technical support is worth a few extra dollars. They’d rather spend their time building their businesses than on hold. Agree? Please contact us to inquire about pricing.
Another company offered me $1.99 website hosting. Why do you charge more?
Answer: Since the late ’90s, the cost of hardware, bandwidth, and overseas labor has been declining. This turned website hosting into a perceived commodity: “Buy at the lowest price. The vendor doesn’t matter. It’s all the same service.” This marketplace mentality has created a price war among vendors. And the casualty of this war has been customer service.
Companies simply do not charge enough to offer the quality of service you expect when you have a problem with your service or a question about your bill. The large companies that charge too little make it up with aggravating up-sells, outsourced overseas customer support, long contracts, and rigidity in their offerings. The small companies that charge too little are out of business in a year or two. Neither situation is ideal for your business. You need some sanity and stability from your service provider!
We believe long-term, profitable relationships require a welcome and fulfilling client experience – not necessarily the lowest price. For over a decade, BlueChannel has charged enough to offer you a reliable product backed by exceptional service; this is a scenario where we all win.
Do you offer a 99% uptime guarantee?
Answer: 99% uptime sounds very impressive until you do the math; it means your site could be offline for over 87 hours per year! Even 99.9% uptime – the industry standard bragging number – means your site is down almost 9 hours per year.
Worse, did you know the uptime statistics many hosts cite relate only to network accessibility and power to the server? This means the most common causes of downtime, those that occur at the server level (denial of service attacks, spam related issues, hardware failures) are not included. In other words, real website downtime is almost always more than these claims indicate.
And what happens when the uptime promise is broken? Well, if you can prove the downtime occurred, you can put in a request for service credit – typically a prorated portion of your monthly hosting fee. Unfortunately, your website or email being down is a problem that a $5 refund doesn’t fix. It’s really not even worth your time to request!
Instead of hype and bogus claims, here is what BlueChannel offers:
Actual website uptime statistics as monitored by a third party – Across all machines, the last three years are over 99.9566%. This 11 hours of downtime over the past three years includes scheduled reboots and maintenance, downtime that other providers remove from their stats. (Updated on June 1, 2012)- 24/7 multi-contact monitoring – With any provider, problems will and do occur. When they do, you can rest assured that you have US-based employees, typically including one of the owners of BlueChannel, working to address the issue within minutes. One owner, Mick, lives within a half mile from the data center! And we post downtime updates to twitter in real-time.
- Our no hassle service termination – Even if you’ve prepaid for a year, if you are EVER unhappy with your service, we’ll give you a prorated refund and help you transfer your site to a new web host. If it’s in the first 6 months of service, we’ll refund everything you’ve paid to date.
Do you offer 24 hour customer service?
Answer: Have you noticed that everyone has toll-free numbers and extended service hours, but you can’t get a living, breathing human on the phone who can help? Claims of 24/7 customer service are sometimes not as good as they seem.
BlueChannel gives you the tools to manage your account around the clock. Should you need our assistance, we provide unlimited support via email and telephone during normal business hours, 7:30am to 5:30pm Monday through Friday (and typically longer). We answer calls and return voicemails promptly. We do not outsource our support overseas or employ low-paid, unqualified support staff.
We monitor web servers 24 hours a day. When a problem is detected that would affect your service, our automated alert system notifies support personnel in four geographically diverse locations according to an escalating schedule. In other words, if the servers have a problem, we’ll be working on it within minutes, day or night.
Why is BlueChannel better?
Answer: When was the last time you saw a marketing brochure that described a company’s reputation, the quality of their product or service, and their responsiveness to customers as average? All companies tout their superiority, but the bottom line is you don’t know until you do business with them. More than marketing hype, here are some facts: BlueChannel is an owner-operated small business, dedicated to clients in a way large companies cannot be.
- BlueChannel has an 15+ year track record.
- BlueChannel enjoys high customer retention – some of our clients have been with us since 1997, the first year we started.
- BlueChannel removes the risk by offering you two exclusive and unbeatable money-back guarantees.
- BlueChannel owns high end equipment in a world class datacenter.
Can you help me get rid of all this spam?!
Answer: Email is becoming unmanageable. We can offer you two suggestions:
- Read our article entitled, “10 Ways to Unclutter Your Inbox and Regain Your Morning Sanity.“
- Sign up for our free Spam Shield service.
Can I send mass email?
Answer: No. Like most reputable email service providers, we don’t allow our clients to send mass email from our servers. It only takes one of every thousand people to complain for it to cause deliverability problems that could potentially affect all users on our network.
We recommend that you use a third party service, like MailChimp or Constant Contact, to send mass emails. This will protect our servers’ IP addresses from getting banned, and protect the reputation of your domain with third party anti-spam services.
Please see Email Marketing for more information.
How much do you charge for design, development, and custom software?
Answer: BlueChannel designs and implements custom solutions on either a fixed price or time and materials basis. A fixed price works well for any project where the cost of precisely specifying the development task is much less than the cost of producing the software. An hourly (time and materials) basis is used when it is difficult to precisely specify the task or where the task necessitates the development of a precise specification first.
Did we miss something? Simply contact us for a prompt and personal response.
