Support can come through many forms, whether it be online forums, blogs, chat, email, or even Twitter responses.  Below is my list of products I use and continue to use because of their great customer support.

The Best

Product: CFWebstore

CFWebstore is a ColdFusion cart created and maintained by Mary Jo. I don’t even use ColdFusion anymore but I still stick with this cart if the clients hosting platform allows for it.  Maybe it is because I have created so many stores with it but I really think it is Mary Jo’s online support.  Mary has chat open from her site (cfwebstore.com) for any questions or issues.  It seems the chat is online around 5 hours a day.  For a quick question this is great area.  Mary herself is not usually the one you are chatting with but the person there now is very knowledgeable with CFWebstore and is still a great resource.  Mary is more of an open participator in her yahoo group for cfwebstore.  I know if I put up a question that is not totally insane, someone (more than likely Mary) will be answering my question or at least following it up with follow up questions.

Product: WPPortfolio

WPPortfolio is a WordPress plugin created by WPDoctors.  This is one of my favorite plugins, easy to use, and exactly what i needed for a simple web portfolio.  I have blogged about this plugin in the past but it was for its usefulness, now I am blogging about it because of the support I received on a free product.

I’ve had issues in the past updating the plugin and I couldn’t figure out why.  I spent around 2 hours trying to figure out why after the update I was getting errors.  I decided I would email the creators since there was nothing I could find on forums or any other blogs.  It took about 8 hours but Dan from WordPress Doctors emailed me back.

Even though Dan did not resolve my issue and I figured it out myself, he was nice enough to go back in forth about 4 times through email, trying to help me even though this was a free plugin and I in no way paid one dime for any type of support.  Just from this alone if I ever need a plugin created from scratch WordPress Doctors will be the first place I get an estimate from.

The Worst

Product: Inmotion Hosting

I have been using Inmotion Hosting for a few years now, and I am currently still using it for this site.  I had no issues the first year of my hosting with Inmotion until I tried to add to my hosting package (actually give them more money).  I went on their chat and asked my questions about my options and when I asked to purchase this upgrade they said it would take a few days to make this change.  I really needed to get this new sites hosting taken care of and have everything pointing correctly so I could get a nice Parking page up.  I asked if there was anything they could do to get it up that day (8 hours) and they still said no, so I told them never-mind and to take my auto-renew for my hosting off, they didn’t even try to help me out or go above and beyond in any way.  I moved that site to a new host and had my parking page up within 12 hours (because of DNS propagation).

Before this all happened I had actually gotten the company I work for to sign up with a pretty nice sized hosting package through InMotion, I also got two other people to open up InMotion accounts during the first year I was hosting with InMotion.  Their hosting is just not good. Its so basic and you pay much much more than say justhost.com.   Some more issues with InMotion always happen during their chat and all usually about the same issue.  For some reason InMotion servers have hiccups or are restarted every so often usually during the week anywhere from 9-5 EST, which couldn’t be a worst time to do anything that would take sites down.  Each time I have noticed a site or server is down, I will jump on their chat and notify them.  Instead of them being thankful that I let them know, they usually say something stupid about how my DNS for my domain isn’t pointing correctly, or they will ask me a million questions before they will check in with it, hoping by the time I answer all their crap the server will have restarted.

I have officially taken all my sites of InMotion Hosting’s servers and have transitioned them to my new host. So far no issues.  Cross your fingers.