It might seem simple, but not many web hosts realize the good sense in maintaining a news area.

Along with giving you a great way to show case your updates to the servers, and innovations in the business, you can reduce the number of trouble tickets during a downtime by pro-actively advising the clients on ETA to service restoration, and efforts being taken for the same.

Any decent help desk software now comes with a new area add-on. It is very easy to maintain. All you need to do is to keep posting into it on a regular basis.

So, what can you post?

Answer is, anything that has the potential to show you in a good light. There is no dearth for such news in web hosting. To survive you will need to keep updating your servers, and keep bringing in new features. Just write them up into an attractive 2 paragraph post, and put it in the site.

Eg: 8th April 08:32 hrs GMT : The engineering division just now confirmed upgrade of all servers to secure version of OpenSSL. YourHost is one of the first companies to respond to the HeartBleed SSL bug, which is affecting all major companies the world over. We patched our servers within 24 hours. Your business is safe with us.

I’m sure you get the drift.

The rule of thumb is to keep posting positive news at least once a week. This is in preparation for a rainy day when there could be a service downtime, and your clients would head off to the news area to look up the issue.

During a downtime, the important information you need to convey is the ETA to service restoration. It should be accompanied with the root cause of the problem, and the efforts being taken to restore the service. Once the issue is resolved, you should then post a summary of the issue, and actions you are taking to prevent such a thing from happening again. All this will ensure that you will retain the good will of your clients.

A well maintained news area opened up for SEO will serve as a good advertising platform as well. Any webmaster searching for a common issue faced at any given point of time is likely to come to your news area. The larger number of happy news is bound to impress a customer enough to sign up with you.

Cheers!

About the author

Visakh S is a senior software engineer at Bobcares. He has extensive experience in managing technical support teams of web hosting companies and data centers. He is passionate about systems engineering, and loves to get his hands dirty on systems automation. His free time is spent reading books and being with his family.