29July2008
Posted by admin under: announcements.
Well, I do not know if any will miss the “Live chat support”, but I’m getting more and more complaints about live chat support not available.
In fact we are always available, but support agents are busy with another chat sessions and that’s the problem! .. this tool is misused.
The main purpose of chat support is to offer fast hints and fixes, a ping-pong style conversation:
customer 1: Is there a way to disable visitors from certain IP to visit my website?
support: sure, check cpanel > IP deny manager.
customer 2: my website xy.com looks down!?
support: yes, we are rebooting this server, will be up after 3 minutes.
and so on, but the fact is, the average length of chat sessions from logs is: 26 minutes!
so, in average, every support seat (seat = 3 x 8 hours shifts) can answer around 50 chat requests per day .. this is not enough and customers are not happy.
so we decided to discontinue this support tool by the first of August 2008 and keep the helpdesk ticket system only, from our logs, I see high satisfaction rate in tickets, the support agents take their time to read, escalate and answer tickets .. they are doing good job and I guess it will be much better without the disturbing of chat requests.
Update, Aug 1st..
I just read this comment in hostsearch website, see what the customer said:
looks like Lori was trying to chat but she could not, site idicates that she can .. yes .. but support agent was busy at this time(s)! ..,
14July2008
Posted by admin under: announcements.
Dedicated containers are available now, please check VPS Hosting page for more details about this new package.
4July2008
Posted by admin under: announcements.
Today, we have setup the first beta server(s) for this new type of web hosting, the Dedicated Containers are our virtual private web servers plans.
For who is not familiar with such things, Virtual Private Servers or VPS is large physical server divided into smaller servers, each server is having a full operating system and resources including CPU, RAM and disk I/O.
Every VPS owner have full access to configure server software even reboot his own VPS without affecting other VPS owners.
Pros of VPS:
- flexible, you can do whatever you want whenever you want with your server.
- have Guaranteed resources, your website’ need of RAM and disk are dedicated.
Cons of VPS:
- its a full server, so you need good experience to deal with it, secure it and keep your operation system up to date.
- For hosts to keep price down, the resources allowed for each VPS usually is small, imagine giving 256MB of RAM to run HTTP, MySQL, Email, cpanel, ..etc. such non optimized VPS may end with less performance than our shared hosting accounts.
So we decided to make it Fully Managed Containers + guaranteed RAM from 512MB + a lot of hardware and software optimization, our initial tests show that single container can beat low cost dedicated server .. more good news on the way.
26June2008
Posted by admin under: Uncategorized.
conversation rate: the percentage of unique visitors who take a desired action upon visiting a website.
If your desired action is to make your visitor buy something from you and you could made 5 visitors buy out of 100 visitors, then your conversation rate is 5%.
want to increase your sales online? there are 2 options, get more visitors, or enhance your website to make more people buy from your website (increase the conversation rate).
Increasing conversation rate, website optimization to increase conversation is subject of too many books today, personally, I’m reading “web design for ROI“, a small and nice book like other books it try to learn you one word ’sympathy’ if you can think in same way like your visitor, it will be easy to you to design your website and convince him to make a purchase, simple rule .. but not easy.
‘Human nature is tricky: once we learn something, it’s hard to imagine not knowing it, this is why user testing can be so valuable; it reminds us that most people don’t know what we know.‘
Web design for ROI - page 27.
OK, to optimize your website for better conversation, you need to think like how your visitors think, but you will not able to do that because its hard to ignore what you already know.
the solution, to get user-testing software (a software that monitor users, their mouse moves and clicks,..etc .. cost around $1500), get people to test your website or application, get results, enhance your website, test again, ..etc … who have budget for that!
the other solution is tiny and promising online application called Crazy Egg, ok, it doesn’t give the super deep results like Morae, but it does give very important information in what your visitor look for in your website without hiring people to test your website.
getting a free account in crazyegg will take 10 seconds, you will be given a small javascript code to put in your page, that’s all .. check this nice demo
the report called “heatmap” gives you exactly where the user click, the most clicked links and the referrer of users who clicked this links .. ok .. you must see yourself.
for website like 2mhost.com, this tool is better than nothing, frankly speaking .. We have no time to hire people to test our website or order process so getting some picture of real visitor’s behavior is amazing.
I hope to make detailed review of this nice tool soon, for now, its free for limited number of pages and visitors (its enough for mid-size website though) and there are paid upgrades… but I really do not know what I’ll gain if I used the paid service .. I’m checking that now, Paid accounts lets you have realtime results, free accounts have 3-6 hours delay, for me, no big deal.
10June2008
Posted by admin under: Uncategorized.
Few months ago, after sending a renewal reminders, I got a reply from a customer that he already renewed his domain with “Domain Registry of America”, he said that a sales agent called him and asked him to renew his domain as soon as possible and the customer paid to them by credit card, in this time I explained to the customer that 2mhost is not “Domain Registry of America” and the domain is still registered by us and he had to pay us to renew the domain! I did not follow this case because it looked like a scam attempt by someone.
Today same story happen again, same scenario, but this time the victim paid with check so there is no doubt that “Domain Registry of America” themselves is scam company and contacted our customer to renew his domain while they do not have any access to this domain and they can’t renew the domain for him.
I hope I can get more details from our customer to publish it here, until then, be ware, we are not or affiliated with ”Domain Registry of America”, they can’t renew your domain name.
Update
our customer sent us the letter she received from DROA, its a hardcopy sent by regular mail
Although everything written in that letter is correct, but its hide important parts too need to be explained before they ask for money.
- They advice the user that her domain needs renewal every year and this is correct.
- They told her that she do not have to renew with the current registrar in sneaky way
- They DIDN’t tell her that she need what so called EPP code from current registrar to complete the transfer, and the other steps required to complete the domain transfer process.
anyways, legally I see nothing on the letter, but its not ethical way to gain customers.
