What is included with WebAlliance hosting and support?
We have tried to make WebAlliance hosting and support easy to understand and predictable to price. In this way, our customers know what to expect with each hosting and support invoice and eliminate surprises.
SKUs and File Storage
Our hosting and support includes the first 100,000 SKUs online (the average customer has approximately 60,000 online). After the first 100,000 SKUs, a small per-SKU charge applies to cover the additional costs of hosting.
World-class hosting at Tierpoint® Data Centers
Providing a reliable, secure, performant, and highly available solution.
WebAlliance hosting and support also includes up to 10,000 files or 1,000 MB of non-product image storage (your product pictures do not count in this amount) of files up to 10MB in size.
This would include items such as MSDS sheets, instructions sheets, spec sheets, content page pictures, slider pictures, etc. Additional files over this limit incur a small per item charge to cover the additional costs of hosting and maintaining the data.
Our customers can store large files, videos, and other files that are not appropriate for WebAlliance on services such as Amazon S3, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, and most other services that can produce a link to your file.
Bandwidth and Video
With WebAlliance hosting and support there is not a separate charge for bandwidth. Customers tend to find charges for bandwidth difficult to track, difficult to audit, and difficult to predict.
We want our pricing to be simple, transparent, and predictable so we include bandwidth in our pricing. However, we are unable to host extremely large files or videos since they can produce massive usage and storage costs that would drive up prices.
Does that mean we cannot have videos on our site?
Absolutely not! For videos, we recommend you host them on YouTube, or if you want a paid service, Vimeo or VidYard are both good options. With these services, you can host your video and easily embed it into your website. Your customers still view the video on your site and have no idea where it is hosted.
Most website handle videos in this way. Embedded videos are seamless to your customers, and your customers will not have to leave your site to view your video. Even better, if you host your videos on YouTube, Google will find that content which tends to help Google search rankings. Plus, you can have your own YouTube channel with all your video content in one place.
Support Access
Depending on your package and support choices, you will have two or three named support users that have exclusive access to our team. We have created a support portal just for our users. We built it for our customers so that they could request help and review support tickets quickly and easily.
Not only that, your named support users also have access to our team via telephone if needed. We are typically available Monday thru Friday 8 AM to 5 PM CST. We understand that help tickets are the typical way of getting assistance, but at times, a phone call is the best way to communicate. Our Customer Experience representatives are happy to help.
Occasionally we are asked why only two or three users are included in our hosting and support packages
First, if you need more than what your package includes, you can add them for an additional fee. However, we have found from experience that if you add many named support users, things often descend into chaos.
Users make requests that override each other, changes are requested by one party, but not understood by the other users it can quickly become a mess.
We recommend a "train the trainer" approach to our clients
This means that you will want to have a person/people internally that your users funnel their website requests through.
Because these users have been trained, they are likely to be able to answer your internal questions quickly. If they cannot answer the question, they have access to our Customer Experience team to help them quickly resolve their inquiry.
How long does it take to get an answer from Customer Support?
This answer varies, and we cannot offer a guarantee on the time. Over the past several years, our typical answer time is often in less than 30 minutes with averages well under an hour.
It may take longer than that to solve your issue, but we try to get back to you with an initial solution or follow-up question within that timeframe.
We have tried to make WebAlliance hosting and support easy to understand and predictable to price. In this way, our customers know what to expect with each hosting and support invoice and eliminate surprises.
