If you’re a devout disciple of the Word And Mouth mantra you’ll no doubt be demoralised by a distinct lack of daily dosage.
This is for two reasons:
- I’m out of the country.
- I’m in the country where my web hosting service is located.
Anyone who knows anything about technology (as you’ll discover, I’m therefore ruling myself out of this talent pool) will understand how wise it is to have your web hosting service in the same region as your business. It not only helps with the ‘ping’, i.e. how quick your website is served up to your paying customers, but makes things easier to get things done when things go wrong.
Things did go wrong for Word And Mouth on Wednesday.
I discovered quite by chance that my site wasn’t being dished up. Nothing – no discernible error message I could fathom, simply a blank space where the pages should be.
So I contacted my hosting service – let’s call it FatCow, not because I’m in any way vindictive but because that’s what it’s called. They told me they were having difficulties (the award for the most obvious tech support statement of the year goes to…) and it would all be fixed soon. They hadn’t bothered to contact me because they only thought it would take three hours to figure out.
24 hours later I was pretty frustrated. There had been developments: the blank space had been transformed into a 500 error message. But the pages still weren’t anywhere to be seen, just like the email update giving me a vague idea what was going on.
So I contacted the tech guys again and they said they were working really hard. Small consolation for the website operator. They had buried an update message somewhere on their site. Not on the home page, of course, since they are currently running a discount promotion which would be severely hampered by outage communications. Beggar the existing client, focus on the prospects.
There are so many warnings in this post about how not to run a business, it’s untrue. All I want you to do is stay close to your customer – whatever the weather. Keep them updated, stay friendly and don’t expect them to know the answers when you don’t.
There will be no recompense for the huge impact FatCow has made to this website. Customers are numbers, it would seem, in this game.
All that matters is we’re back up now. Stick with us – there are so many more exciting times to come.
Have a great weekend!