Customer service

It doesn't matter what type of online business you're in: it's important that your customers and prospects be able to contact you. Whether they're needing information or a problem to be solved, they want to know that they can reach you.

However, it's become quite clear that e-mail is unreliable. Not because e-mail is broken, but because many Internet Service Providers (ISPs)—AOL, Comcast, Hotmail and Yahoo are the worst—are blocking messages they believe are spam.

I spent about 90 minutes on live chat with Host Gator today, trying to track down an inability to connect to my MySQL databases using a desktop application. (I use NaviCat, which makes accessing a database much quicker than using phpMyAdmin.) I was reminded again of why I like and recommend this web host.