Back to Best Of

A lesson in customer service (why my site was down today)

I was out and about today, and got home to find email from a friend telling me my site was down (Thx Livia). Hmmm. Ok. Checked it out, and they’re right.

So I check the dreamhost status site, and there’s nothing for today. Ok, so I contact dreamhost directly. I hear back quickly.

I’m told they suspect there is a script running on my site that used too much memory, shutting down the entire site. I’m sent a reference for how to investigate this myself to figure out what might be the cause.

Meanwhile. My site is still down.

I say WTF. I can’t fix this if I can’t get to my site. And moreso, why not charge me $50 or whatever you want for going over my memory limit, a fee I’d gladly pay, instead of HAVING MY SITE DOWN AN ENTIRE DAY.

I ask them to temporarily bump my memory to get the site up, which they thankfully do, and fix the likely cause of the problem (a plugin I didn’t update when I upgraded to WordPress 2.7).

Lessons:

  1. Always inform customers if you are turning their service off, regardless of the reason. I should not need a friend to let me know, or be surprised on my own, even if I’m to blame for the reason the site is down. Always notify me when, and if possible before, you turn off what I’m paying for.
  2. It’s better customer service to charge extra for doing the right thing, and keeping *my customers* out of it by loaning me more memory. It’s done for bandwidth, for overdraft charges at the bank, why not for memory usage? Charge me whatever you want – just don’t ever let my site go down.

    3. Anyway, end of story is I’m sorry the site was down. And end of the line I’m to blame. Dreamhost has always been a mixed bag of good and bad. They suggested their PS service, which does allow for variable memory use at a price, which I’ll check out.