Striving for Excellence in Customer Service

Smooth Stone Services is committed to providing excellent customer service. As it says on our home page, "Our mission is to provide affordable information technology services to organizations seeking to transform poor communities around the world, and to provide a crucial role in a community’s transformation by providing technology education and jobs to its members." We feel that the best way for us to do this is to provide quality web hosting and technology solutions.

The Good: We are Constantly Improving!

Announcing our new Website Disaster Preparedness strategy

Smooth Stone Services is committed to providing an excellent web hosting service to nonprofit organizations world wide. Today, we are proud to announce a new benefit for hosting your website with Smooth Stone Services (as well as reiterate a similar service): Website Disaster Preparedness. While our clients probably do not know about our Server Disaster Preparedness strategy, we take great pride in being prepared for the worst: A hardware failure or similar event that would force us to rebuild our server from scratch. Our Server Disaster Preparedness is a simple process, but will reap huge benefits if the unthinkable were to happen. We currently take a snapshot of our server infrastructure every 24 hours as well as every week. If we did have to rebuild from scratch, it would be a simple process - clone an existing snapshot onto a new server! (That's only the part that we've already been providing, that you didn't know about!)

Today, behind the scenes, we have implemented the first part to our Website Disaster Preparedness strategy. Our Website Disaster Preparedness affects individual clients and not our server as a whole. We are now taking a backup of all of the databases on our server infrastructure. Like our Server Disaster Preparedness, these backups run every 24 hours, and we keep daily backups for a day and weekly backups for a week. If you, our clients, accidentally delete information that is stored in a database (such as data that is stored in a Drupal or WordPress site), all you have to do is contact us, and we will restore your website from a previous MySQL backup!

Coming soon, we plan to implement a full Website Disaster Preparedness strategy so that we are not only backing up our clients databases' but also all of their files as well.

The Bad: It's not always the cheapest solution!

While nonprofit organizations and NGOs often times do not have a lot of capital resources, and we work hard to make our service affordable to these organizations working around the world, we feel that the cheapest solution financially is not always the most beneficial. Cheap web hosting can come at a price: poor customer service and frequent downtime, or the inability to have things explained, because the customer is hosting with a large company that outsources its technical support. We want to do better than this.

We also need to be self sustainable. As a result, we need to revamp our web hosting pricing structure. To help ourselves overcome this hurdle slowly, and develop a pricing structure that works, we have already raised our prices by $1/month (making our cheapest annual contract $71.40/year). However, over the coming months, our customers will likely see higher prices.

At the old contract of $59.40/year ($4.95/month), the equivalent of just over 1.5 hours per year communicating with, providing technical support to, and doing minor (free) updates with the client would be spent for the same amount of money we currently charge clients for technical support. We spend hundreds of hours each year refining our website, updating and maintaining our server infrastructure, and helping our customers. As you can see, this is very unsustainable!

We will continue to work hard to provide quality services while keeping our prices low. If you have any comments or questions, please don't hesitate to ask!

Thank you for your continued trust in Smooth Stone Services!