Is the pageBuzz support any better than the other hosting companies?

Of course we are going to tell you that it is, but other may disagree.

The fact is, we are a small company, with offices in our home. We are not a mega company with millions of customers with call centers in multiple states and countries.

So often customers will get our answering machine as we are on the phone with other customers or have stepped out to pick up mail or stop at the store for groceries or beer. The truth is, we cannot answer the phones 12 hours a day 7 days a week and not step out once in a while or take a bathroom break.

If you are the kind of person that needs help now and can't wait an hour or so for a call back, then companies with large datacenters are a better option for you because they have operators waiting for calls.

However, if you are the kind of person that expects meaningful help from those operators you will be disappointed. Most of them are paid minimum wage to read solutions from a computer screen, just tell you what it already says in the help section. They have never built a website, never run a business and have no real understanding of what you need or want. They don't know much more than what you can already read in their help section.

The operators have no stake in your being a long term customer. It will not affect their paycheck if you leave and they have no connection with you other than to do their job.

They are however trained to be nice to you as you scream at them and yell in anger that they are totally useless and have not been helpful at all. Even after all that, they will say, "have a nice day", with a smile and positive attitude.

Those are things you wont find at pageBuzz.com because we do know what we are doing because we have built thousands of websites, we built the system and developed the programs you are using as well as writing and managing the software that runs our network. We run a business and have for many years. We have answered our phones and worked directly with customers since we opened.

When we talk to customers we are not reading from a script, we are not on a timer or being reviewed by a manager. We are being reviewed by you, if you don't like what we have or how we help you leave, and then we lose money and our income goes down. So we are very vested in trying to work with customers so they have a productive website that works for their business.

The mere fact that we have 10 years of customer support experience makes us better than call centers that rotate operators monthly with no experience.

As small business owners we also understand the frustrations you have with technology, taxes, legal issues, marketing and other aspects of running a business. We share the same problems and concerns and have created programming to help solve those problems because we understand how things work.

We often spend an hour or more helping customers with business advice, marketing advice or even talking about how to get cheap advertising or TV commercials made. Not because it is part of our support but because we get to know our customers and we can often help in other areas where we have experience.

If you call and ask how to make TV commercials we will likely not give you an answer, but as we work with customers and get to know them we try to help in any way we can. Sometimes a simple bit of advice can be the difference between staying and business and failing. Every customer that stays in business will be able to pay for their website, so our interest is in keeping you in business.

We are not trained to be nice to you so if you yell at us, we will likely yell back. We are just human beings and there is really only so much we can take. We can also get grumpy at the end of a 12 hour day of answering the phones so our patience can sometimes wear thin. But we always try to maintain a good attitude and help everyone that needs it. Unfortunately we cannot fire ourselves if we handle a call badly, so if that is you on the other end, we both have to deal with it.

We do treat this as a business and we try not to take anything personally. So even if you had a bad day and yelled at us, tomorrow is another day and we wont hold it against you. We don't escalate bad customers to a manager, we are the managers, so if there is an issue, we can deal with it directly.

We don't have to place a work order and hope something gets fixed, we usually can fix it while you are on the phone or withing a few minutes after.

It is hard to compare a minimum wage call center employee with a 15 year experienced business owner. When you call, we do know what we are doing and can usually help. But we are not always available and sometimes it can get quite hectic with many calls coming in at the same time. Then other days, we don't have a single call. So return times and availability can vary.

Being small, when there is a problem with a server or the network, someone has to go to the datacenter to correct the problem. While it is unlikely to impact your website because of the redundancy that we have built into our network. It will take at least me away from the phones for several hours while I repair the problem or work with our tech staff.

Answering phone support is not our only job, we still have to run the business, develop new software, manage the network and deal with all the issues of running a business. So the support can suffer when we get into chaotic situations or get busy with other projects.

Our support is very much different than most companies and that may not work for everyone. We try to be open about our size and abilities so we can build a customer base that fits our business model.

In almost all cases waiting an hour or two for a call back is not going to kill anyone. While waiting is not typical, it is always a possibility due to out limited resources.

The support you get from an owner is much different than you get from a call center employee. It is more personal, it is more informative and not only do we understand the problems people have, we build software and make adjustments to make it easier every day.

When we get 50 people calling with the same question, we make the program more informative and user friendly because we can't handle all the phone calls and emails. After over 10 years of doing this our support calls are almost non existent, meaning the system is very easy to use even with out our phone or email support.

Other companies don't have the flexibility in the programming and just deal with the support calls over and over. But we see every support call as an opportunity to improve our site builder platform. As we improve, there is far less need for support and our company can continue to grow with the same staff.

I am sure over the years we have offended some people and I know we have asked some people to move to another systems because we could not deal with them, but for the most part our customers like us, they know us and trust us. We have built a system around our support calls, adding features and programs that customers asked for. Our support is the foundation of our product and very important to us for both maintaining customers and future development and growth.

We offer a very unique and personal product but we can't answer every call on the first ring and always be available every time we are needed. We can't answer every email with a 5 minute turn around every time.

We will often be on the phone while people call every 5 minutes sometimes 10 times in just an hour. If you are the kind of person that needs that lightning fast response rate all the time, pageBuzz.com is not the right fit for you. We are just people and not super heroes.

We also try to handle calls based on priority. If Joe's website is not working and Jane's is asking for help in understanding how to submit sites to the search engines we will call Joe back first and get the site issue resolved and Jane will have to wait until we have the time to explain how search engines work.

There is really no science to it, we are just people doing the best we can with what we have. But we have much more to offer, much more at stake and more experience doing it.

It is really up to you to decide what business model suits your needs and make the best choice. We don't need millions of customers to pay our employees, so we can afford to be truthful and turn away businesses that would not be happy with our service.

We think all of this makes us better than our competition, at least for some businesses.

We remain open about how we operate so that businesses that need our type of service will use it and those that need more will choose an alternate website hosting service. We feel this is better for everyone and there are no surprises after you signed up.