(FORTUNE Magazine) – Last year, after reading about Indian call centers in a magazine, Web.com CEO Will Pemble decided to "offshore" his Internet hosting company's customer service. This November, plagued by cultural misunderstandings and lost customers, Pemble brought all of Web.com's calls back from India to Brookfield, Conn.

In the end, Pemble concluded, it was costing his company more to send work to India than to do it in one of the highest-cost states of the Union. Dell made a similar--if much more widely publicized--decision in November, routing calls from some high-end business customers back to Texas from its Indian call center in Bangalore.

None of this means that the great migration of service jobs to India and other low-cost overseas locations (see "Where Your Job Is Going," on fortune.com) is about to come to a halt. It is an indication, though, that there are limits to offshoring. The most obvious have to do with politics and public opinion: Corporations are having to tread more gingerly on the outsourcing front for fear of backlash from elected officials and customers. If the U.S. economy keeps strengthening, that backlash should fizzle. But CEOs are being forced to realize that while their shareholders may think it's swell that customer calls can be routed seamlessly to people in India making $2,000 a year, many customers are less pleased.

In Web.com's case it wasn't so much antiforeigner sentiment among customers as frustration with tech-support people who were simply too far from headquarters to reach the people who could solve problems quickly. "If it's a binary decision process--yes or no--then you should consider outsourcing," says Pemble. "But if there's a maybe in there anywhere, then you can be sure that all your customer-support difficulties will gravitate to that like iron filings to a magnet."

As a result, many larger companies--like Dell--are developing a hierarchy of which calls get shunted overseas and which don't. "Not everything is moving offshore," says Amit Shankardass, solution-planning officer at ClientLogic, a Nashville-based call center outsourcing company. "Airline companies would not move management of high-yield customers offshore." Instead they practice, to follow industry jargon, "onshoring" or "nearshoring"--which means sending calls to Canada.

Meanwhile, back in India, the vaunted limitless supply of well-educated young English speakers willing to answer phones is looking slightly more limited. Much of the IT work outsourced to India in recent years benefits from the 10 1/2-hour time difference with the Eastern U.S.--Indian programmers can work while their American counterparts sleep. But call centers and back-office operations that offer real-time service need peak staffing in the middle of the Indian night, and many providers are already struggling with high turnover (upwards of 20% a year) among their urban, just-out-of-college workforce. As a result, Indian operators are beginning to eye older workers living in the provinces. Translation: Get ready for an even wider cultural and language gulf between workers and Western customers. --Justin Fox