I am a big fan of chat support. I don’t have to drain my battery waiting on hold until its my turn in the queue. Plus when dealing with error messages its infinitely more helpful to be able to copy/paste to the agent. Sadly finding competent help is still an issue. Here is an excerpt from a recent chat support experience.

(8:39:41 PM) Sheldon He: The SSL will need to be re-issued, since they are IP specific.

(8:40:06 PM) Nick Anderson: ssl certificates are not tied to ip addresses

(8:40:56 PM) Sheldon He: Actually they are. They are domain and IP specific. That’s why it needs a dedicated IP.

(8:43:06 PM) Nick Anderson: ssl is just tied to a name, but you can only run one ssl cert per ip without the Server Name Indicator tls extension to openssl

(8:43:20 PM) Sheldon He: Well, according to our SSLs in the past, the SSL needs to be re-issued when you move from a Shared to a Reseller.

(8:45:40 PM) Sheldon He: I’m unable to change the settings here, this will require an admin. Please email them at support@hostgator.com and we’ll be able to help you with this issue.

Luckily his final answer was correct and whoever answers the support emails was able to complete the ssl cert migration.

On a side note, its things like this that make me tell people to not use shared hosting accounts. Get yourself a VPS or a dedicated server if you want to do anything worth while.