Average response time from helpdesk?

[piku]

Hey,

Just wondering how everyone is doing w/ their experience w/ BH's helpdesk/support staff. Average response time? Positives/negatives?

TIA,
Sherwin

[timberford]

well i opened a ticket on sunday and i still havent got an answer back which is dissapointing because in the meanwhile my site is down.

[alethea]

The first two days were quick giving me the wrong impression. It's the slowest response time I have known. I think about 4 days now. I don't think I've ever waited more than 12 hours with previous hosts.
alethea

[walker]

Just wondering how everyone is doing w/ their experience w/ BH's helpdesk/support staff. Average response time? Positives/negatives?

My first ticket was opened two Fridays ago. (Although night-time here, it was morning in Bluehostland.) It wasn't answered until the following Monday night. In fairness, response times seem much quicker now. Generally within twelve hours...but I'm guessing it's a bit hit and miss.

I opened a ticket to report a server outage a couple of days ago. It wasn't noticed for nine-hours...and obviously things had been fixed 8+ hours earlier. Yesterday it was impossible to contact Bluehost to report the outage because it was out of hours, their own sites were down, and the emergency telephone option was discarding calls after five minutes. ISTM that an easier mechanism needs to be in place for reporting something as crucial as downtime. That's what caused all the aggro yesterday IMHO. Given previous experience with 9+ hour to four-day support tickets, and this inability to contact Bluehost, how could we be confident they were aware of the problem? Particularly when the DNS problems were still causing outages approx. four hours later?

All resolved now of course, which is great, and I'm really impressed with the professional explanation. I'm sure Bluehost will learn from this incident.

As for telephone support, I've had to call five times now. The queueing time was as follows:

i) Six minutes (to add-on a domain).
ii) Four minutes (to get SSH access).
iii) Five minutes before being hung-up on. (Yesterday).
iv) Five minutes again before being hung-up on. (Yesterday).
v) Nine minutes. (Yesterday. Finally got a 'sleepy' explanation for yesterday's downtime.)

Sometimes the experience can be a bit fruitless. The add-on domain (i) wasn't done properly, so I just suffered the downtime (about two hours for anybody using my UK ISP) waiting for CPanel to detect that I *had* updated the nameservers for my domain, therefore allowing me to perform the add-on.

Over the weekend, I asked somebody to enable to spam box, after being told they would do this if asked. They actually applied a filter to blackhole any email Spam Assassin had filtered as spam, and I lost some genuine email (from the far east -- where they're particularly vulnerable to SA) as a result. I've since worked out how to enable it myself.

There you go. I'm a customer of approx. two weeks, and that wraps-up my support experiences thus far.

[Arubalisa]

I submitted a ticket on Saturday afternoon and received a reply less than 24 hours later. Was surprised since I did not expect to receive a reply until AT LEAST Monday...

[ranchnachos]

I've had only 2 minor support tickets so far, both regarding Time Zone server information with a message board I'm using.

The first ticket was responded to within 15 minutes, and my second ticket was responded to in exactly 11 minutes.

Needless to say, they were both within normal operating hours for a regular business which resides in the US. (8/9a - 5p)

[thicke]

I called yesterday to get my account upgraded to the new limits and everything (disk space, transfer limit, etc.). I was on hold for about two minutes. I was on the phone with someone for about the same two minutes. My issue was resolved less than a minute after hanging up the phone.

[redsox9]

I have had maybe two or three tickets over the past year-plus with BlueHost and most were answered either the same day or within 24 hours. I've also called the help desk a couple of times and got through relatively quickly; I don't think that I was ever on hold for more than a minute or so.

I would rate my experience thus far as excellent, but I have a feeling that there has been a strong push in the last six to twelve months to increase the number of accounts. Now they are finding that they may be a little understaffed to handle what should have been an expected traffic increase. Hopefully they are looking to correct his oversight.

[timberford]

well i opened a ticket on sunday and i still havent got an answer back which is dissapointing because in the meanwhile my site is down.

i'm still waiting...

[WebJDC]

my first one took 30 minutes
the second one, well it was talking more than a day so i just ended up calling them....and they either hung up on me or we got disconnected. but i fugred it out on my own.