Deep Dive – What are Customer Care plans?

26 Nov 2021, by Slade Baylis

There is a dirty little secret when it comes to cheap website hosting providers. Whilst they nearly always come with some form of support, they nearly always deliver a poor user experience. Those cheap hosting providers will often try and get customers in the door with low prices, but with such low profit margins, inevitably it’s the quality of the support they provide to their “customers” that suffers. This is due to having to cut their support offerings down to the bone in order to make their service viable at all. 

To enable that, the line between what support is and isn’t included in their hosting plans is often blurry. And it’s an issue that customers will unfortunately discover after they’ve already signed up. In fact, they’ll only really know once they try to get the support that they believed was included. As you can imagine, this is the worst time to find out, as it’s when you are trying urgently to get an issue fixed, and now all of a sudden you are faced with the option of choosing to either be unexpectedly out of pocket or having the issue remain unresolved. 

This is why here at Micron21, we like to avoid that situation by being clear and upfront as to what exactly is included with our standard 24/7 support package and also outline what the other options are for more advanced 24/7 support.

Standard vs Advanced Support – Where is the line?

With all of our platforms, our clients can use them to host their websites, their applications, and even their email accounts on their domains. To offer these sorts of services, we have a lot of infrastructure behind the scenes that supply power, cooling, and networking to these platforms. And that’s not even mentioning the actual server hardware that these platforms operate on either! All of these systems are required for the service to operate, which is why maintaining and fixing any issues within them is covered for all services with Micron21. For example, if there was an issue with power delivery to a server that’s used by one of our platforms, fixing that would be included with our standard 24/7 support.

For our Virtual Private Server (VPS) services, all the types of issues detailed above could be described as being “under the operating system”. Similarly, for our Shared Web Hosting (SWH) or Reseller Web Hosting (RWH) services, they could be described as being “under the hosting plan”. However, what needs to be noted with any of these platforms is that customers are able to load their own software onto them, and this is where the line is drawn between what’s covered as a standard 24/7 support and what is an advanced 24/7 support plan. 

Anything our customers choose to use on the platforms that we provide, is considered fully under their control, which means that helping configure services or diagnose issues at that level would be considered advanced support. For servers, this would include any issue with the operating system or anything loaded onto it. For hosting plans, this would include any issue with the websites loaded into them. To help clarify this further though, we’ll use some examples of real world issues and explain where that line is drawn.

For websites, it’s becoming more and more common that they are built on Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress. CMS platforms like WordPress are built to be automatically updated to make sure they are secure. Whilst usually those updates will go ahead without an issue, sometimes a conflict between different plugins can make the website crash. This can require the support of a web developer for it to be fixed. 

In the case above, the underlying hosting server and hosting plan are operating fine, but it’s the website software that is being used within it that has crashed. This is an example of something that would fall into the category of advanced support, as the hosting that we’re providing (everything “under the hosting plan”) is operating normally, but the real issue here is that it’s the actual website itself that has crashed.

As another example, for the email services that we provide, clients are able to send and receive emails through their domains. They can also connect to those accounts through email clients/programs such as Outlook. In some circumstances the email settings within Outlook may change (either automatically with updates or manually by user error) breaking the connection to our servers. This would result in a user being unable to send and receive emails.

This too would be another example where the underlying email hosting service (everything “under the hosting plan”) would be operating normally. The server is still able to be connected to and clients are able to send and receive emails through it, but it’s the connection settings within our client’s email software that is causing the issue. This too would be an example of something that would fall outside the included standard 24/7 support and would require advanced support to fix. 

The above are just two examples. Below we’ll detail some more issues that can occur and indicate which 24/7 support category they'd fall into:

• Issue - The operating system on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) is updated by a user, which fails and stops the server from functioning correctly.
• Standard or Advanced? - In this case, the platform we provide would be functioning correctly and it’s the operating system that has crashed. As our customers choose and maintain the operating systems installed on their servers themselves, assistance in diagnosing and fixing issues at that level would fall into advanced support.

• Issue – Let's say one of our clients has a Shared Web Hosting (SWH) plan with us which hosts their website. One day they attempt to visit their website which doesn’t load at all. They attempt to log into their cPanel hosting management interface, which also doesn’t load.
• Standard or Advanced? – With this issue, not only does our client’s website not load, but other interfaces, like the cPanel interface, also doesn’t load. This could indicate something as simple as a block on their internet connection by the server, or it could indicate something more widespread. In either case, our client’s access to the service is being impacted by something within our control. This would be an example of something that would be covered by our standard support.

• Issue – Within a WordPress website, a user installs a plugin to add features to their website. After installing the plugin, the website breaks due to the PHP version being set to an older version. Even after changing PHP to a later version through the cPanel interface, the website still remains broken.
• Standard or Advanced? – The issue described above is one that is caused by the WordPress plugin software running into an issue and not being programmed well enough to deal with it. The hosting plan itself would be operating fine, so assistance in fixing this would fall into advanced support.

This isn’t meant to be a definitive list, but rather it’s purpose is to help explain not only what type of issues occur and are covered, but also the reasoning behind why they would or wouldn’t be covered under a standard plan.

One question that arises out of this though, is how can you tell if the problem is one caused by issues with the infrastructure itself, or if it’s caused by issues that are actually within the client’s control? As with most complicated systems, sometimes it can be difficult to know. That’s why with all our services, we’ve got one important inclusion in our standard 24/7 support - it’s called the “Initial Fault Investigation”.

Initial Fault Investigation – Tracking down an issue is half the solution

Before you can know where a problem exists, you first need to look into it in some form. To help demonstrate this, we’ll walk you through an example of an issue with an email account. Let’s say that one of our clients reported that they couldn’t send emails anymore and that the emails kept getting stuck in the outbox. To be able to know whether this is an issue with their email program or with the server, we would need to do some tests to track this down. With this particular issue, we could log into the email account through a browser-based login, then see if it could send emails from that interface. If it could, then we’d know that the server and overall service is fine, but if it couldn’t, then this would point to the issue being on the server/service itself. This is an example of what we call “Initial Fault Investigation” and comes with our standard 24/7 support.

This first step means that we can look into an issue for a user initially in order to see whether it’s a problem on our end, or alternatively on theirs. Whilst it can be frustrating to learn that the problem is actually something on the user’s side, there is actually a silver lining here, in that having us investigate the issue initially, actually means that we will roughly know where the issue is located. This way, we can point our clients in the right direction to get that solved themselves. Alternatively, should they want us to fix it on their behalf, this then reduces the amount of time needed to pay for advanced support, as we’ve pretty much already narrowed down the possible causes.

The difference between Ad-hoc Support and Customer Care plans

In the circumstance that we’ve identified an issue that wouldn’t be covered by our standard included support, we then need to advise our customer and find out what they would like to do. The first step would be to provide an explanation of what we’ve found so far. Then we would provide an estimate of how long we believe it will take to investigate/fix. We would then ask our customer if they would like us to proceed with the fix on an hourly basis. However, if one of our customers finds themselves regularly wanting us to perform work for them, they can often save themselves money and get extra bonuses that come with signing up for a Customer Care plan instead.

A Customer Care plan is our term for what goes by several different names in the industry – the common ones being “managed services”, “professional services”, “maintenance and monitoring”, or sometimes simply just “support”. Customer Care plans are advanced support plans that come with coverage for an even wider range of support tasks than customers would receive with standard/included support offerings. For Micron21 in particular, each of our Customer Care plans come with a different amount of included time per month for helping clients either diagnose and fix issues, or in some cases manage their systems. Effectively, this gives our clients greater access to our support staff team and the ability to leverage their knowledge and expertise when needed. This can be much better than having to find and hire someone externally instead and then having to rely on the knowledge of a single person, not to mention that they’d likely charge more!

Our Customer Care plans don’t just give you a discount on our regular by-the-hour advanced support rate though. That cost is the same whether you need support day or night. Alternatively, with ad-hoc support, not only do you need to pay a higher rate for the support during the day, but if you require emergency support outside of regular business hours, it’s even more expensive. Both of these factors mean that if you expect to need advanced support, it’s much more cost effective to sign up for a plan rather than pay by the hour.

One other thing to note is how our Customer Care plans differ from how other providers often charge for advanced support. It’s common in our industry for providers to charge a support fee per service that you would like to be covered. As an example, if you have three hosting accounts and want support for all of them, then this can require separate support charges for each service. As you can see, the cost of “support” from other providers can stack up quite quickly! 

Here at Micron21 though, our Customer Care plans are bought per platform, rather than bought per service. What this means is that if you have a Customer Care plan to cover your Shared Web Hosting (SWH) platform, then it will cover you for all the SWH platforms that you have with us. The same is true for our Virtual Private Server (VPS) and for our VMware Cloud Server (VCS) platforms. If you sign up for a support plan for one, it covers all services that you have with us of that same type.

To help you fully understand the plans that we offer and the differences between them, we’ll need go into detail about each one and their purpose. One important aspect to note, is that each plan is progressive, meaning that each plan covers the types of support tasks in the plans below it, plus also provides coverage for more support tasks.

Customer Care Plans – Which one would be right for me?

Essentials – Coverage for the fundamentals

It used to be true that it was an expectation that most businesses would either have their own IT department - or at least they were expected to have an IT person on staff that they could turn to for assistance. However, for smaller organisations, having such a department or staff member on board is often unrealistic as the costs to do so would be too high. 

To help these businesses, we offer a Customer Care plan called “Essentials”. It’s for those who need ongoing support on a monthly basis for basic tasks. If a business would like to be able to contact us for advice about things such as how to set up their systems or what the best practice is when it comes to CMS platforms like WordPress, instead of paying by the hour, they can save money by signing up to this Essentials plan. With this plan, we then become the first port of call if customers need advice about how systems work or how they should proceed.

Best of all, this “Essentials” plan doesn’t just come with advice about how to configure your systems - it also includes coverage for a wide array of other hands-on tasks. 

Some of the types of support tasks included are:

• Application Installation & Configuration (Supported Apps): Setting up and configuring supported applications; 
• Content Management System – Basic Support: Advice and training on how to use WordPress and common plugins and themes; 
• Operating System – Settings and Configuration: Assistance setting up servers and configuring them as needed;
• Basic Problem Resolution: More detailed analysis into issues with server-side operating systems; 
• SPAM Investigation: More in-depth investigation into received spam or false-positives.

This Essentials plan comes with 1 hour of advanced 24/7 support per month. 

The goal of this Essentials plan is to be a resource that a business can rely on to help guide them through the technological challenges that they’ll face in their day-to-day operations.

Management – Service Management and Monitoring 

More and more common today are services called “Managed Hosting” or “Managed Servers”. Both of these are common marketing terms, but what they actually mean is that the hosting or servers that these are attached to come with ongoing advanced support that’s been bundled in. 

For example, a “regular hosting” plan is a service that you can use to upload a website and create email accounts for use within your business. A “managed hosting” plan, however, can come with additional services such as managed updates for any Content Management Systems (CMS) that you have installed (like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla). On the server side, having a “managed server” could mean that regularly scheduled updates to the Operating System or software is included. In short, the platform isn’t just provided as a hands-off piece of software, but rather as an ongoing service for the customer.

Our “Management Customer Care” plan is the first level that could be considered a managed service. As such, the types of support tasks that come included with it are more management and monitoring focussed.

Some of the types of support tasks included are:

• 24/7 Monitoring - Infrastructure, Server & Network: Full 24/7 monitoring of servers and services running on them, with configurable email and SMS alerts;
• Micron21 Scheduled Updates & Upgrades: Ability for Micron21 to schedule in server updates and upgrades;
• Remote Eyes - Local PC Issues in Accessing Micron21 Services: Remote assistance in accessing Micron21 services, such as configuring email clients with the settings needed to connect;
• Content Management System - Settings & Configuration: Direct assistance installing and configuring common CMS platforms;
• Content Management System - Plugin Install, Configure & Remove: Direct assistance installing and configuring CMS addons/plugins;
• Application - Third Party - Installation & Configuration: Best effort support for installing and configuring other third party applications.

This Management Customer Care plan comes with 3 hours of advanced 24/7 support per month. 

The focus of this Management Customer Care plan is to help clients ensure their environments are up-to-date, functioning correctly, and secure.

Comprehensive – Reactive vs Proactive Support

One important distinction between the plans detailed above and our top tier “Comprehensive” and “Total Care” plans, is that the support provided with those is what is referred to as “reactive”. What this means is that with the previously mentioned “Essentials” and “Management Customer” plans, our customers can reach out to us 24/7 for support and help with issues. However, with the “Comprehensive” and “Total Care” plans, not only can our clients do that, but they can also get a more proactive service. Utilising the 24/7 service monitoring that we offer, we can proactively respond to any alerts that are generated. This includes reaching out to our clients to let them know an issue has occurred and that it’s already being looked into and resolved. 

For customers that have systems with high-uptime requirements, this immediate style of support can be a god-send. This is especially true if they don’t have their own staff available who could fix those issues for them. Just like before though, this is not the only benefit over the previous plans discussed - as an even wider range of support tasks are also included.

Some of the types of support tasks included are:

• Performing Any Requested Work on CMS Platforms like WordPress: Any CMS related task is included, even ones usually delegated to dedicated web developers;
• Content Management System - Updates & Upgrade Scheduling: Scheduling updates and upgrades to the software that is in use on websites to help keep it secure;
• Outside Business Hours Change Management: The ability to schedule in configuration changes at any point in the day;
• Best Effort Third Party Application and Issue Escalation: We can both investigate issues with software directly and escalate to the original software developers on your behalf;
• Operating System - Perform any Requested Work: Any operating system related task is included
• Customer Scheduled Updates & Upgrades: Ability for customer to define dates/times that they would prefer updates and upgrades to systems to occur;
• PCI Management & Compliance Maintenance: Assistance with acquiring and maintaining, PCI compliance (Excludes external charges and licences such as compliance certification, vulnerability scanning, independent audits and penetration testing);
• Priority Support and Issue Escalation: Support tasks also receive higher priorities.

This Comprehensive plan comes with 6 hours of advanced 24/7 support per month. 

The aim of this Comprehensive plan is to not only include coverage for all issues that could occur with a client’s environment, but to also be on the front foot with resolutions to all those potential issues. 

Total Care – The Ultimate Solution

Our final offering when it comes to advanced support - is our “Total Care” plan. This is the only plan that we offer that doesn’t come with a defined list of included tasks. This is because it doesn’t have one! The Total Care plan comes with support for any issues that you have at all, only being limited by the amount of hours that it comes with per month (10 hrs).

The other key benefit for this plan is that it’s the only support plan that we offer that is fully platform independent. If a customer has a Total Care plan with us, it covers all the services that they have with us. With it, our customers get access to our senior technicians, full account management, and the ability to reach out to us about basically any issue at all.

Have any questions about our Customer Care plans?

If you have any questions about which plan is right for you, more information can be found on our website under the page about our Customer Care plans. 

Though if you’d rather just chat to us about your requirements, that works too! Give us a call on 1300 769 972 (Option #1) or email us at sales@micron21.com and we can help you decide if the standard plan is all you need or help you find the customer care plan that works best for you.