Well, I thought it is a situation we as a reseller face in every few days due to many reasons (Natural, Technical etc).

A reseller has least control over servers, also he is under direct contact to clients (if he don't have sub-resellers). Any service outage affects him first and most.

It would be great if we can share some unique ideas/tacts to handle angry customers in this situation.

So how do you handle this ??

Patience is the key, don't loose yourself and start to curse at them which many providers tend to do after fustration.

You would compensate the user depending on the situation...
However ask the user to be calm, patient... in a kindly manner

Thread moved to Web Hosting Reselling.

Rather then worry about what to do in the event of outages, you should concentrate on finding a host where outages are not an issue.

exactly. The best course of action to support clients in case of an outage is to prevent them, by finding a quality host.

I agree that a reseller should be looking for a host that has a good track record. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee against hardware malfunction for example. Even the best host will have its share of bad luck and it will take a while to put the server back online. Good communication between the host and the reseller is important and it sustains good communication between the reseller and the end users.

Most (unfortunately not all) end users are reasonable and will understand that true efforts are made to put their sites back online, but you must have some clear facts to share with them. When you, the reseller, have no idea what's going on, it's really hard to appease your customers.

Reseller hosts would be put into very harsh situations, but then again, usually reseller hosts aren't very big so it wouldn't be as bad as someone with a server full of clients. It could be a very stressfull thing.

One thing that I have seen resellers do are provide extra bandwidth to their customers do to the fact that it can get expensive if you have a high volume site.

Like others of said if you are having issues with the accounting being down it is probably not the best place for you to be at.

I feel the best thing that you can do is notify the customers to let them know there is an outage and that it is being worked on. Fatter the outage is over to e-mail them once again letting them know that the server is back online. All with in this process you should contact your host and keep in touch with them to make sure that 1) they know of the outage and 2) that they are fixing the issue.

agreed, our servers are most of them 100% uptime and one time has gone below 98% few months back due to a dos attack.

it's hard between some clients sending mass emails which makes large loads, dos attacks, or even HD error, holding and keeping a 100% uptime now days is every hard. but they are days that anything can happen and just keep your cool if it does happen to go down. Always keep a backup off site on your desktop | and client emails on your outlook saved.

we have 3 full linux admins that watch our network 24hrs, but some companies do not do this. send only one email to the admin about the downtime, keep in mind that when a downtime happen your admin knows about it before you.

100% is not a "most of the time" type of thing. 100% means "all the time."

It does depend on how you measure your 100%, and how often though.

Good point. Actually, most hosts/servers tend to avoid using a 100% uptime guarantee. You can usually see 99.99% or something, and whenever there's a downtime, they'll reason out that it's part of the .01%.

Anyway, back to the topic, I think the only thing that resellers can do is to reply to all the support tickets of the customers, and assure them that everything is being taken care of. I think that is what the customers really need -- assurance, and if during outages, the resellers are nowhere to be found, then they will surely panic.

A good way to inform customers in case you have multiple servers is through your company forum. If you let customers know to signup in the beginning, then you can update all Network Statuses, uptimes, and even answer server-specific questions which are available for everyone to see (thus reduces support request volume).

IMO, a "bad" host would wait for the customer to tell them that a server is down, while a "good" host should be proactive at all times and notify right away in a public arena where customers can refer to.

I think that as a reseller you must maintain open communications with your clients. It's a good idea to take the initiative and try and contact and update clients who are experiencing the outage to let them know what is going on. Even if you do not do this, answer questions and tickets with honesty and let them know that your upstream provider is on it. I don't think it's necessarily a "good" or "bad" thing if you tell the person up front or not. You should be available to them either way and give them the honest answer.

As was mentioned above, you must first put yourself in safe territory by finding the right host to purchase a reseller account from. A good host will do their best to have you online as quickly as possible and will reimburse you for the downtime as you will do to your clients (provided that is how you operate, of course). The odds are downtime will happen at some point and it's your job as a reseller to react the right way. Clients are much easier to get along with when they know what is going on and that someone's working on it.

I think you will have to maintain the communication with the provider and your client to explain things before they actually lose faith in you

We have found that keeping our resellers "fed" with as much information as possible is a good way to prevent their anger from surfacing.

1) Create some "announcement" forums, and then *use* them. Post ALL THE TIME, for ANY little thing. If the server even hiccups, then you should post an announcement. They will thank you for "keeping them informed", and when a serious problem occurs, they will be trained to visit the announcements forum for regular status updates, rather then pester your helpdesk with "what's happening!!!!" requests.

2) Ask your resellers what kind of communication THEY want to see from you. Then listen to their feedback and try to implement it.

3) If your servers are routinely having problems/downtime, then you should consider moving to a different management company. A good management company for your servers should be able to give you at least 98% - 99% uptime.