Hosting Problems and how (not) to deal with them.

Kyle Neath, creator of this blog’s WordPress theme, has a great post about recent uptime woes at TextDrive and Dreamhost and the differences in the way they handled telling their customers.

He comes down rather hard on TextDrive, whom I’ve admired, but never considered using. Their unique selling point is “TextDrive is a hosting company run by and for people who love publishing on the web.” Which is a great sentiment, but, personally, I would rather use a hosting company run by people who love servers and routers.

I’ve angered plenty customers in my time, so I can empathize with their desire to blame someone else and tell their customers to stop hassling them while they’re trying to fix stuff. Still, when they say things like:

“please know that we have admins watching the servers 24 hours a day, and if a problem arises we are instantly aware of it. Filing a ticket or writing any of us directly will at best distract someone from the job of solving the problem at hand”

it seems they have lost touch with their customers. People are inclined to believe that their problems are much worse than someone else’s problems. In this case, it seems that TextDrive not only think that their problems are much worse than their customers’, but that their customers’ problem are completely separate from their own.