Great Companies

When you are a web designer/developer, you are generally reliant on a number of third-party suppliers to provide you (and by extension your clients) with essential services such as site hosting, domain registration and DNS management, email newsletter broadcasts, hosted version control and more.

Obviously, you will grade your quality of experience with these suppliers largely in terms of the reliability of service that they provide. But these days most reasonable suppliers offer very similar levels of reliability, so what becomes more and more important is the quality of their customer service. All services will encounter a problem every now and then; the true mark of a great company is how they address those problems, how quickly they respond to your support requests and questions.

After dealing with literally hundreds of companies with stunningly crap customer support, when I find one where the people are helpful, quick to respond and knowledgeable about what they do, I hang onto them pretty tight and recommend them to as many people as possible. So I thought I would recommend a couple of companies that I have dealt with a lot recently and have found to provide both excellent reliability and fantastic customer support.

Wired Tree (Hosting)

Wired Tree offer managed VPS as well as dedicated servers, with cPanel/WHM at reasonable prices. I host all my personal sites with them, and we use them at work now for all our clients’ hosting, and they have performed excellently in terms of speed and uptime. More importantly, their customer service has really been second to none – support requests are generally answered within 15 to 30 minutes, and they are knowledgeable, honest and exceedingly helpful. Highly recommended, check them out at wiredtree.com.

Campaign Monitor (Email broadcasts)

These guys are great! They provide a really nice, easy to use online email broadcast tool, which does it’s job very well. They also are quick to respond to support tickets and information requests, and are eager to help and quick to look into any problems that I have encountered (mostly my fault!). After using an number of other email broadcast tool suppliers over the years I can honestly say that none have even come close to the level of service that these guys offer. You can sign up for an account at campaignmonitor.com for free to check out the tool.

Any one got any other great companies they can recommend?