The Big City

When I decided to move my sites to a US based web host I felt a little guilty and slightly apprehensive. With so many friends working in new media I wanted to shop locally but there was simply no comparable product available at anything near the same price. Then there was the support issue. People warned me that it might be difficult getting help when I was trying to solve problems with people five thousand miles away on an eight hour time difference.
The web host I chose, I won’t mention their name for reasons I’ll explain later, has been great for the last nine months. Their servers have been up all the time and extremely fast, mail delivery has been virtually instant and the features they offer have remained far in advance of what my local-shopping friends have access to. Today, though, I suddenly faced my moment of truth. A series of interconnected programs I’ve been testing for the last couple of months suddenly stopped working. An hour of checking and I determined that the problem lay with a change made by the web host. I was pretty cross and immediately raised a ticket on their customer service system. Four minutes later I got a reply.

Jon,

This is a configuration issue our developers have been tweaking since Wednesday. A new exploit was discovered and the security had to be tightened.

The issue here is that the content of your upload was rejected. The .mp3 was flagged and as a result the 403 was issued. I must send this to our developers so that they can adjust the rules.

I was extremely impressed, really amazed. Now another email has arrived, just under five hours after I told them about the problem.

Jon,

We have permanently corrected the problem. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thank you.

And he’s right (although can any problem really be permanently solved?) everything is working fine again. Amazing, and this is on a Saturday, mind you. Admittedly this was their mistake but even so, do you think I would have had this experience with a British company? Please, if I’m being unfair tell me. I’d love to hear about any amazing customer service anyone has had from a British company lately because I’ve got to tell you, it’s starting to depress me.

And why don’t I want to tell you their name? Because I’m worried that if everyone starts using them they might get overburdened, maybe the servers will slow down, maybe you’ll all be demanding customers who can’t track down your own problems. Resources could be wasted, motivation might be reduced, things could still go wrong, so no, I’m not telling. Wild horses and hemp rope won’t drag it out of me.