How to Tell if Your Hosting Company is Actually Just a Reseller

How to Tell if Your Hosting Company is Actually Just a Reseller?

I remember the first time I put up a website, it was one of the most embarrassing experiences in my life. It really was. Seriously. It ranked high up there along with my first kiss.

You remember your first awkward kiss? You’re just breaking out in pimples, you barely got out of puberty, and the member of the opposite sex leans forward and tries to kiss you and you just drop the ball. You really do. You make a fool out of yourself and you make him or her feel awkward. Well, that’s what happened to me when it came to my first big online property.

The reason why I’m all emotional about this and why I still get moist about this situation from time to time is the fact that I had investors. That’s right. I’m talking about friends, family members and professional colleagues who invested close to half a million dollars in my first internet venture.

As you can well imagine, when people let go of half a million bucks, they expect some sort of result. And this result is not just your run of the mill, everyday, online worthless website. Because if that’s the kind of experience that they wanted from me, they did not have to invest half a million dollars in my project and in my ideas.

They’re looking for something else. They’re looking for something better. And, as you can well imagine, all of this has gone unstated. Everybody assumed this. I definitely knew it. I didn’t have to say it, I didn’t have to spell it out, but everybody knew it.

In fact, when the group of the investors huddled around me as I tried to load the website because I was unveiling the website to them for the very first time, I could smell and taste the anticipation in the air. In fact, it was so thick you can cut it with a dull butter knife.

And guess what happened? That’s right. I screwed it up. Since this is a family website, I cannot use the exact words that I want to use, but you get where I’m coming from, right? The page won’t load, and I had to pick up the phone, with egg on my face, to get to somebody, anybody, to fix this problem.

And guess what happened? I kept being pushed from one service provider to another, from one call center agent to another, and one contact service representative to another.

You have to understand that this was way before the days of highly efficient call centers we all know and love today. Now, thanks to highly educated, motivated and professional people from the Philippines handling customer service calls, you can rest assured that this type of situation doesn’t happen all that often.

Well, this was in the late ’90s, and I had egg on my face because it seems that nobody who picked up the other end of that phone knew what the hell was going on. As you can well imagine, I was not happy. I was far from a happy camper. But that’s the situation I was in because it turns out that the hosting service provider that I signed up with was a reseller.

Now, I could have told my investors the old stand by. I could have given them the runaround. I could have pointed a finger, and I could have blamed everybody in the universe except myself.

But I knew that they deserve more than that, so I said to them, I was sorry, this is a fiasco. This is a complete and total and unqualified failure. I owned up to it and I got to the bottom of the problem. The problem, again, is that I was dealing with a reseller.

The reason this happened was because the web designer of my website referred a host to me. It turns out that he does not host with them. It’s kind of like referring a dentist to a friend of yours and you have no direct experience with that dentist. Do you see the problem there?

But I did not blame my web designer. It was still on me. The buck stopped with me.

So I took care of the problem by making sure I wasn’t dealing with a reseller. Instead, the next host that I had my website ported to was the top of the line host, and now we could all see the pages load quickly. But believe me, it was a very embarrassing and humiliating experience. Keep this in mind.

You have to quickly tell if your hosting company is actually just a reseller or not, and the best way to do this is to simply pick up the phone and try to get some sort of customer service done. That’s when you will know if you are dealing with the real deal or just a reseller.

That’s the bottom line because the shorter the line between you and the actual source of the service, the better off you would be. Believe me, the better off the visitors to your website will also be. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.