[“On Writing” is a new category of SvN post that offers examples of interesting online copy.]
Freshbooks responds to downtime
It’s easy to provide great service when things run smoothly. Handling problem situations is a much tougher — and often more important — test. Freshbooks’ Up and Running blog post is an example of how to do it right.
The company experienced a hardware failure which resulted in downtime and some loss of data. Bad news for sure. But the company’s response, including a detailed explanation and a free upgrade for all accounts, defused the situation and turned a negative into a positive.
Especially nice: the clearly titled sections that explain the problem, what caused it, what they were doing about it, how to tell if you were affected, what to do if your account was affected, and an apology.
For anyone who was inconvenienced by the interruption of service and/or irretrievable data, myself and the entire FreshBooks teams are deeply sorry. I want to extend our thanks to those of you who called and emailed to enquire about the problem. To a person, everyone was polite and understanding, which under the circumstances, was greatly appreciated by myself and the other FreshBooks staff who were hard at work bringing the service back online.
The result? Impressed customers who left raves like these:
Thanks for the open communication and commitment to quick resolution during this ordeal.
I for one greatly appreciate your detailed information, acknowledgement of the problem, and your willingness to provide your clients with some perks to make up for the inconvenience. Outstanding customer service is very hard to come by nowadays. I am a new trial FB user who is now sold, if I wasn’t already!
I appreciate the honesty, dedication and commitment on the part of the FreshBook staff.
Dreamhost’s anatomy of a(n ongoing) disaster
Dreamhost handled a similar rough patch with a long explanation peppered with tongue in cheek images of disaster scenes. The level of detail is impressive though it’s probably a good idea to offer some sort of Cliff Notes version for people who don’t want to read through that much text.
Our number one priority right now is getting this nagging network problem understood and fixed. Once that’s the case, we should be able to put things back in Alchemy, who didn’t lose power on Friday at least. Once things are going good there, we’ll be able to add new servers and transition old ones slowly with little to no downtime.
We’re also going to be buying our own UPSes, since we have learned we can’t trust our data center OR our building to do it. We’ll start by putting the core routers on them, then our internal databases and servers, then our file servers, and finally the hundreds of customer mail, web, and database servers.
Tech support for technophobes
Phoenix Soleil provides tech support for people who are scared of computers. Tech vets may scoff at her frilly tone but it probably resonates strongly with her target market: technophobes who need help taming their PCs.
Do your computer problems leave you feeling overwhelmed, confused or isolated?
When I coach someone with computers, I make technology accessible by explaining it in language they can understand and by going at a comfortable pace. My teaching method is nurturing, with my personal commitment to respecting a person’s intelligence. My goal is to destroy shame and make using technology enjoyable…
My patient, caring one-on-one guidance and instruction helps technophobes overcome their fear.
Related: Six Apart does their customers right [SvN]
Adam Thody
on 05 Dec 06I have taken note of Dreamhost’s amiable candor in the past. I just wish they’d back it up with adequate support. In fact, if not for their friendly, personable nature I would have moved to a more reliable and responsive host long ago.
Myself
on 05 Dec 06Re: “myself and the entire FreshBooks teams are deeply sorry…”
In this instance, “myself” should be “I.” “I” am sorry. The rest is great, but people make that mistake all the time and it drives me absolutely crazy.
Jim
on 05 Dec 06Great transparency, yes, but great writing…
Huh?
RJB
on 05 Dec 06I was affected by the Freshbooks and was thrilled by their ability to not only inform people of the issue, but also that something had been done about it.
I do not have any experience with dreamhost, but from the quotes above I get the feeling that they have not actually done anything beyond identifying what they are GOING to do versus what they HAVE done. Of course addressing the problem publicly puts them miles ahead of most hosting providers.“My goal is to destroy shame and make using technology enjoyable…” Fantastic! Most people feel technology is not enjoyable. Let them know it can be.
Jacob Patton
on 05 Dec 06I’m with Adam regarding Dreamhost’s lack of adequate support. While I was their customer, their frequent emails and postings were nice, but the service just wasn’t there.
(For the curious, I left Dreamhost for PlanetArgon and couldn’t be happier.)
Anonymous Coward
on 05 Dec 06I think people’s expectations of support are way out of whack with the prices they are paying for some of these services.
Dreamhost’s lowest end plan is about $8/month. That’s per month. That’s about 25 cents a day. A few phone calls or tech support emails can quickly wipe out an entire year of profitability on that one account.
I think it’s time for people to understand that you can’t have everything at $8/month. People assume that because you are paying anything then the deserve everything. That’s just not how things work.
blackant
on 05 Dec 06I think Dreamhost’s overselling has caught up with them. Their service is absolutely horrendous. One of my client’s sites was hosted with them (at my recommendation, yikes!) and when one of DH’s server upgrades broke their site it took over 2 days for support to respond to our urgent pleas. When they finally did write back, they had no insight at all and followup questions for them took another 2 days.
After a couple of experiences like that, reading their “funny” newsletters was hard to stomach.
andrew
on 05 Dec 06We are a fairly satisfied Dreamhost customer, and have been for nearly 2 years. I’ve wrestled with any number of web hosting administrative panels, and Dreamhost’s online support system and admin. tools are some of the best I’ve ever used. They weren’t always that way, but one thing that has always impressed me is how they’ve routinely taken user feedback and quickly turned it into functionality. You regularly see updates and improvements throughout their admin panel.
They are definitely not for someone looking for a phone number to jump down someone’s throat the minute something goes wonky. They went through a terrible run of bad change management and luck a few months back—we were minimally affected—and I can see why many jumped ship. Had our customers been more inconvenienced, we probably would’ve moved too.
Mike McDerment
on 05 Dec 06errr…fair commentary on my writing, but let the record state that I had had two hours sleep in roughly 35 waking hours when I wrote that…
P.S. Matt: thanks for including us in this post – it’s a goodie.
Dan Lee
on 05 Dec 06Great to see the honesty ethic out there in force. If you stick to your principles no matter what, then ultimately success will prevail. I’m a firm believer that you should be allowed to make mistakes, so long as you learn from them, and stop the same one from happening in future.
Nothing is bullet-proof. It happened to us. Customer happier than ever!!
Turn the negative into a positive.
Jeff @ DreamHost
on 05 Dec 06Thanks for the mention, Mike!
Just to clarify, we’ve definitely not rested after posting that blog entry (which was a while ago). Since then, we’ve hired additional staff, procured hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of needed hardware, and have worked to greatly restructure our network infrastructure. We’ve still got work to do and improvements to make, but already our stability has gone up significantly and our incoming support has lessened.
In short: We made some bad decisions, wised up, and are on our way to fixing them up (those that haven’t been already). In the end, being ‘open’ with our customers has worked out great, letting us know about problems and solutions that we may have otherwise missed.
Note that we’ve posted about this in greater detail in later entries in later blog entries and on our status site.
http://blog.dreamhost.com/ http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/
- Jeff @ DreamHost
paulo
on 05 Dec 06Re: Dreamhost
All Dreamhost offers are excuses without any tangible results. I got the same line of BS back in April/May and from the comment posted by Jeff it seems like nothing has changed. That is a shame because the people running the place seemed to be people I wanted to do business with.
I was a former “business” hosting customer with them and while the open communication was great (and impressive at first) it wore very thin after the 3rd major outage I experienced in less than 4-5 weeks (not to mention the little things that added up in between). First it was a file server problem, then the db server had a hardware failure, and the the file server choked again or some BS. This is in addition to intermittent downtime my sites experienced throughout each month I was a customer.
Running a hosting business is not easy. I realize that. My beef is the lack of response for someone paying $60/mo for a “business” level package. That does not sit well with me. Also, as a business owner if something is broken I have to fix it or else my clients walk. I guess the difference between the DH peeps and my small operation is they have more clients than they need so being unresponsive to a few here and there won’t hurt them.
I was promised a prorated refund and never got it. I have “credit” at a hosting service I will never use despite DH promising me a refund on my credit card (not just a “credit”). If I had an $8/mo plan and only hosted personal stuff with them it would not be a huge deal. But the time and effort it took me to migrate things away from DH and their complete disregard of their word really irks me.
We are Basecamp customers and Freshbooks customers. We have been part of both services growing pains as well but they know how to fix problems quickly and proactively work to prevent future problems. I dig that and really appreciate the tangible results.
Rabbit
on 05 Dec 06I’m with AC (why, AC, why?!) as to the price-to-support-performance ratio.
I pay $65 per month at Rails Machine for the low-end package, and even then I don’t expect a whole lot in terms of support. I know from reading their site (they specifically offer support plans) and speaking with them via e-mail that they likely expect their customers to know what the hell they’re doing.
Despite that, they’ve been helpful in pointing me in the right direction when the issue was not on their end (which, if I remember correctly, has always been the case).
I just glanced over their site and I don’t see any blaring signs that say they offer fanatical support of any kind. I don’t see why people are so uppity about it. =/
If you feel you “can’t be down,” find a host that offers a service level agreement. =P
Rabbit
on 05 Dec 06Oops. By “their site” in paragraph four I meant Dream Host’s site.
Anonymous Coward
on 05 Dec 06If you feel you “can’t be down,” find a host that offers a service level agreement.
Truth is people don’t want to pay the price for “i can’t be down.” They think that sort of 24/365 should come for free. Think about that: Something that always works all the time forever always should be free. They don’t realize there’s a real cost to that sort of uptime. And it’s not $8/month.
People say it’s important but when it comes down to it it’s not important enough for most people because they are unwilling to pay for it.
Lots of talking, not much walking.
Jeff @ DreamHost
on 06 Dec 06Paulo -
I’m not familiar with your situation, but I can definitely look into it. If you contact us and ask to be put in touch with Jeff C (that’d be me), I’ll see what happened with your refund/account and try to make it right.
As for things not changing, well, quite a few things have changed. We’ve poured hundreds of man-hours and money into improving our services (especially after the prolonged lousy experience people had a few months back). We’ve revamped our infrastructure, brought in additional support and administrative staff and have even begun migrating services to another data center. Obviously not all of this can be done with the flick of a switch – it takes time, trust me – but we are trying and so far it is bearing great results. If you left at the height of the disaster from earlier this year, though, I can see how you’d see it differently.
- Jeff @ DreamHost
Dan Boland
on 06 Dec 06The way I see it, every hosting company has customers that feel like they totally got screwed over. It’s the nature of the beast.
Anonymous Coward
on 06 Dec 06The way I see it, every hosting company has customers that feel like they totally got screwed over. It’s the nature of the beast.
Ain’t that the truth. Everyone feels screwed over these days.
Unofficial DreamHost Blog
on 06 Dec 06Dissenter
on 06 Dec 06LeafyHost is currently in the midst of a similar crisis. Sadly, they are not handling it the way FreshBooks and Dreamhost did:
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/599009962631/m/279003894731
Things get real interesting around page 25 or 30.
A shining example of how NOT to handle your customers when you hose their service and lose their data.
Baz
on 06 Dec 06The major problem with the Dreamhost situation was that they put up the ‘Anatomy of a Disaster’ post and then nothing actually got better for several weeks (although I’m sure they were working hard behind the scenes).
Whether you were paying $60 or $8 makes no odds if you are getting no service.
Great writing, transparency and openness make the blow easier to stomach but it’s actually results that count.
BTW: My company stayed with Dreamhost throughout and is still with them.
Takumi
on 06 Dec 06When I first got hosting with DreamHost it went down quite a lot, but I guess the server I was on was one of the first batch that got hardware upgrades. Because I don’t remember having down time for at least 8 months. I’m def. a happy dreamhost customer. :)
JF
on 06 Dec 06I don’t use DreamHost, but I find it impressive that Jeff from DreamHost is responding to people’s comments right here in this thread. That’s a sign of a company that’s making an effort to do the best they can.
nat
on 06 Dec 06Jeff @ DreamHost
on 06 Dec 06Hi nat -
For what it’s worth, I’m not a DreamHost technical support technician. I’m actually involved in handling security/abuse issues full-time (stopping spammers, fraudsters and the like), not normal day-to-day support.
I just happen to be a long-time reader of SvN and was a bit surprised to see our name pop up in my aggregator.
If you see a DreamHost employee posting in a forum, weblog or some other ‘unofficial’ place, it probably means that they happened upon it by chance or it was pointed to them by a customer. More often than not, it’s not a DH support technician who is doing the posting (they’re usually very tightly focused on getting the support queue down), though our company is fluid enough that anyone – even one of our company’s co-founders – may chip in to help someone.
We’re web people, here. We read a lot of the same blogs and forums other people read in our own time, from home, etc. We’re a pretty popular host, so it’s kind of natural that we’d find mentions of ourselves from time to time. We’re impulsive, so sometimes we respond. :)
PS: The only official place to get support is, and always has been, by contacting us via the web panel. Sometimes we suck and get backlogged and don’t get back to people as fast as we should, but it’s pretty rare that someone falls through the cracks. Posting to a blog or forum is fine too, but there’s no guarantee we’ll see it.
- Jeff @ DreamHost
Mark
on 06 Dec 06And if my bank just did the best it could?
JF
on 06 Dec 06Mark, who said anything about a bank? Mixing examples confuses the point.
I just said DW appears to be doing the best they can. For some people that’s plenty. For other’s it’s not good enough. So they can stick around or leave. It’s up to them.
The most we can ask of any person or any company is to do their best. Best is subjective. Then it’s up to you.
Chad Sakonchick
on 06 Dec 06JF – You may think it’s impressive that Dreamhost is responding to people on this blog entry, but I think it is pathetic. Jeff is simply creating the illusion of real customer service to the thousands of potential clients here at the SVN blog.
I’ve been a dedicated server customer paying $350 a month for delays and excuses since August of 2005. I started off as a shared hosting customer and developed my webapp around certain things Dreamhost customer service reps told me I could do. After much development, another rep suspended my account and told me what I was doing (which I had been cleared to do earlier) was creating too much drain on server resources. They forced me into getting a dedicated server, then proceeded to take several weeks to set it up while my developers sat on their thumbs.
Since then it’s been the same or worse. It seems a week can’t go by without Dreamhost f’ing something up, or not having the proper Rails updates etc etc.
All I know is if airline travel or my cell phone service was as bad as Dreamhost’s customer service, I would have hung myself long ago. Jeff if you want to appease me, you can reimburse me the 6 months of lost development your company has provided me over the past two years.
Mark
on 06 Dec 06Rather than defend my point, I’ll just heartily agree with Chad’s, as a fellow former DW customer.
Anonymous Coward
on 06 Dec 06Chad, you sound upset. Why don’t you take this up with Dreamhost directly?
Further, you seen to have been upset for well over a year now. Pack up and move on to somewhere else. Isn’t your peace of mind more valuable than constant complaining and constant letdowns? If you don’t like DH, walk away and be happy somewhere else.
I’ll never understand why some people seem to enjoy prolonging their pain. MOVE ON.
Chad Sakonchick
on 06 Dec 06AC – I agree with you. I don’t understand why people torture themselves in these situations either. Unfortunately for me, moving servers and hosts is not like moving apartments. One cannot simply up and leave, especially when a significant amount of your scripts have been written to work with Dreamhost’s proprietary cpanel. Right now, it is easier to go with the flow and deal with poor customer service than it is to rewrite everything and move.
Adam Thody
on 07 Dec 06I’ve worked with developers in the past who were great guys, put in long hours, and put their all into the project, but in the end they simply couldn’t do what they said they could do and they had to be replaced. This is how I’m starting to feel about Dreamhost.
It doesn’t matter if it’s $60 or $8 per month, if you say you’re going to do x for $y then you need to do x for $y. If you can’t, or it’s not cost effective for you to do so then you need to charge more, or say you’re going to do less. If I have to pay a few more bucks per month for better support then I will (even if that’s with another company)...but I’m paying what they asked for and I expect them to deliver on their end.
I would never count on my customers to continually accept late or missed milestones, or bad code simply because I had taken on too many clients – even if I sent them a quirky explanation after the fact.
Further to Chad’s comment, when you have dozens of sites bouncing from provider to provider is a MAJOR hassle due to script reconfigurations, DNS changes, etc, etc. One more reason it’s important for providers to live up to their agreements.
Anonymous Coward
on 07 Dec 06Further to Chad’s comment, when you have dozens of sites bouncing from provider to provider is a MAJOR hassle due to script reconfigurations, DNS changes, etc, etc. One more reason it’s important for providers to live up to their agreements.
No one said it wasn’t a major hassle. But isn’t that hassle worth your happiness? Sometimes things are hassles and sometimes things are worth it.
If your web sites and uptime is as important and critical as you suggest, it would seem that you are doing your customers a disservice by staying with Dreamhost—a provider who you think is sub par. You see, you’re as bad as Dreamhost, you just choose to ignore it.
People make the weirdest decisions.
Adam Thody
on 07 Dec 06If your web sites and uptime is as important and critical as you suggest, it would seem that you are doing your customers a disservice by staying with Dreamhost—a provider who you think is sub par. You see, you’re as bad as Dreamhost, you just choose to ignore it.
Like I said, until recently I’ve given them the benefit of the doubt because of their candor.
Changing hosts is not a decision I take lightly, and if I were to pick up and leave whenever I had an issue with a host I’d do a lot of moving. It’s a matter of weighing the cons of staying versus the cons of making a move.
Also, when the service is up, I’m quite happy with it, the commentary here is regarding their support when things go awry.
This discussion is closed.