Trust matters in hosting. That’s why reports that come from real customer experiences are an important source of information for anyone trying to find a new hosting provider. This is why SiteHost customers might start seeing invitations to publicly review us on Trustpilot. We’ve picked Trustpilot because we wanted a third-party system, and because it prioritises the views of genuine customers.
It’s entirely up to you whether you submit a review and what you say. Choosing a hosting provider isn’t always easy, and the difference between the best and worst customer experiences in this industry are vast - like the difference between an accelerator and handbrake. So if you do decide to say something - thank you.
The importance of trust
In any situation where one business trades with another, trust is important. Judging trustworthiness can be difficult at the best of times, and hosting raises a lot of the stakes.
Unlike grabbing a product off a shop shelf, it’s hard to see what you’re getting. Hosting providers tell you what hardware they run and how well they maintain it, and you take their word for it.
For a lot of people the nuts and bolts of hosting are a mystery (and understandably so). If you’re not an expert in OS patching or DNS, it can be hard to know whether a provider actually knows their stuff.
One of the most valuable things that we can offer as a hosting provider is high-quality support and service. It’s hard for anyone who isn’t already a SiteHost customer to know how good that support really is, and how much easier it is to sleep at night when you know that our team is monitoring and supporting your infrastructure.
The cost of trusting the wrong provider can be high, as well. New Zealand has seen some major hosting providers drop the ball recently, and the impact on their once-trusting customers has included days of website outages, lost emails, and more.
New Zealand businesses deserve hosting from a trustworthy provider. But in a field where some well-known names have been letting customers down, establishing that trust isn’t easy.
Real experiences matter
When it comes to building trust, the experience of actual customers is much more important than anything we could say about ourselves.
For many years we have used an internal system to collect data after anyone interacts with our support team. Not everyone answers, but we’ve reported what we find on our home page. As I write, 98% of the last 200 responses were positive. We’ve always put a lot of focus on this number. Knowing that it’s out there for anyone to see, it drives us to do our best work every day. And when we do, it tells people something about our trustworthiness.
This sort of transparency is good, which is why we’re going further now and asking our customers to explain in their own words what SiteHost is like. And we’re doing it with a third-party platform that can verify real SiteHost customers.
How review verification works
When you see a Trustpilot review marked as “Verified”, that means that the review is from a real customer. The verification system is built into the way that person was invited to leave a review - there’s no need to login, and we don’t share customer lists with Trustpilot.
When we built review invitations into our feedback system, we rejected the idea of just emailing out unexpected invitations emails. Your inbox is already busy enough, and since a third party is involved, you deserve more control over the process.
So we’ve added a step that asks whether you want to leave a review. If you do, it asks for your email address. An invitation will be sent to the address you enter. That same address will also be shared with Trustpilot for the verification process.
Lastly, thank you
A few dozen customers have already accepted invitations to review us. To every one of them: thank you. We’ve appreciated what you’ve said about us, and more importantly we’re sure that other businesses like yours have been able to make better decisions based on your reviews
We’ll keep working as hard as ever to earn the trust of everyone who hosts with us. And as more reviews come in, everyone will be able to see how we’re doing.