My experience dealing with hosting companies is that whenever you contact them about any problem, they invariable say that the problem might be at your end...
Well, in their slight defense, I will say that most of the weird problems we hear about actually are on the customer's end. When someone says "I followed all your instructions and Outlook still doesn't work", for example, 99.9% of the time they either made an accidental mistake in the setup, or they've got freaky firewall software, etc., on their computer. Or maybe Outlook just needs reinstalling. Or something else unrelated to us.
However, the "not investigating it to be sure" attitude irks me, too. We investigate everything for three reasons:
- From a purely selfish perspective, I don't want to have to waste time answering the same question again and again.
- If this is one of the rarer cases where it is on our end, then we need to know about it right away.
- Most importantly, people are paying to have their problems solved. You can get free hosting and e-mail from several sources: one reason you choose paid hosting instead is to have someone knowledgeable to turn to who can point you in the direction of solving the problem, even if it's "not our fault" your e-mail doesn't work.
This all seems obvious, I'm sure. I don't know why some (many?) companies don't do it. Either they're too big to train people consistently, or they're too small to have the resources to do something right the first time, or they don't invest enough in developing tools to help their support staff.
I'm not trying to toot our own horn; I know of several (mostly medium sized) hosting companies that have real support and reliability, but quality still matters (perhaps because the owner is still involved in answering tickets and gets annoyed at having to clean up a mess in the event of problems). You can find good companies -- honest!