Hostgator upgraded their Business Hosting Plan

According to official news released, the toll free service is connected via VoIP with the support of Houston-based VOIP Company, VOIPo. It doesn’t cost anything for Hostgator Business Plan users for the number. Further more, the free number comes with 100 minutes of free usage per calendar month. That’s $4.9/mo call time credit for a $12.95 hosting plans.

What I think about this?

In my opinion, this is amazing. As mentioned by Hostgator marketing directior, Chad Bean’s:

“It’s no mystery that having a toll-free number on your website can drastically improve conversion rates and further establish trust with your site’s visitors. By providing toll-free numbers for free, we’re adding another service to our growing roster of free add-ons and helping to give our web hosting customers the competitive edge in the increasingly competitive hosting market,” says Chad Bean, HostGator Marketing Director.

A toll free number offer is extremely attractive as it’s very valuable for business owners.

This latest deal definitely keep Hosgator one step ahead their competitors. They are, in fact, setting a new industry standard with this offer and I’m sure it will cause certain level of panic to other web hosting providers. Will other companies like Bluehost and Lunarpages follow this trend? I can’t be sure.

Hostgator’s new ticketing system

First, the control interface of customer support is different now. The designs look cleaner and it’s more user-friendly. More over, you’ll notice a friendly message from Brent (founder of Hostgator) regarding on the upgrades. This change will inject better automation and increase efficiency of the customer support team.

What’s more behind this is that the upgrading of ticket system is just a part of Hostgator’s latest project named ‘Gator’, where the system will evolve into an integrated billing, affiliate, chat, and ticket system. According to Brent, Hostgator’s old system needs upgrade desperately. The system, lack of modern IT automation, is using ModernBill for billing, Kayako for tickets, LivePerson for chat, and a hacked up version of ultimate for affiliates.

The new system on the other hand will improve a lot in term of customer-support interaction (such as customers can rate all HostGator responses), spam detecting, as well as employees management at Hostgator’s end. According to Brent, when everything has been completed it will result in millions a year in savings and at least a 30% increase to staff productivity.

It’s no wonder that the folks at Hostgator seems excited with this change and saying that ‘Freedom is coming’. Hopefully the price will not increase when the productivity leveled up.

In a quick glance, here’s the overview of Hostgator hosting plans.

* Hostgator upgraded its hosting plan in late October.