Customer Support Gone Shockingly Right: Redux

Like most faithful bloggers; I start every Saturday morning by first visiting my own blog. In fact, nothing makes me happier than seeing an entire website dedicated to myself. Sickening, isn’t it? But we’ve already established the narcissistic nature of most bloggers before. This should come to no surprise, dear reader. What surely was a surprise though is what happened when I entered the magical words of navidazimi dot com into my address bar. I was confronted with an ugly error message about an internal 500 server error.

First of all, I know what you’re thinking: why doesn’t Navid have a bookmark or favorites link to his own website if he frequents it so much? Or, why isn’t his blog his browser’s home page if that’s important to him? The truth is I really enjoy typing my name and having a shortcut to my website would truly defeat the purpose. In any regard, baffled with this mystical error, I logged into host’s control panel to see whether there was an outage reported. Nothing. The status reported that all sites were operational. I figured then, if those reports are to be trusted, the problem lay within my own site. I decided to open a ticket with the support personnel.

Now I think we’ve all heard and even have our own share of horrible customer support stories: rude operators, technicians without a clue, support engineers that just read troubleshooting manuals verbatim, and what not. To be fair though, there have been some stories about customer service going shockingly right but those few and far between. In fact, it’s so rare — that the linked article went to number one on both Digg and Reddit!

I submitted my trouble ticket and within 15 minutes, I got a reply. Not just an automated reply that my ticket was important and being worked on… but rather by a real life person. To truly understand the awesomeness of what occurred, I’ll include their reply:

The errors in your website were being caused because someone maliciously editing and appended to the .htaccess file in your account. This was possible because this file, along with many of the other files in your account, was world-writable. I have adjusted the permissions of all of the files in your account to remove this world-writable setting to ensure the security of your files. I have also removed the offending line from your .htaccess file which has rectified the errors you were experiencing with your web page. If you have any other questions please let us know.

Thank you.

David Runion
HostRocket Support

Let’s reiterate what just happened. They located the problem. They fixed the problem. They located the root cause. They fixed the root cause. All in 15 minutes! Now I don’t have to explain why I’ve been with HostRocket for more than six years. In fact, I’ve always been impressed with their customer support. But this, to me, was well beyond what I could and would have ever expected from a web hosting company. Things did go wrong (as they often do) — and here it was even my fault — but they addressed and resolved the issue apologetically. They were courteous, informative and prompt. There is nothing more I could have asked to make this situation any more pleasant. It goes without mention that I strongly recommend HostRocket for their support personnel alone. There are a hundreds of other hosts that beat HostRocket on prices and maybe even features. But this type of service commands the utmost customer loyalty. As long as I have a personal blog, I’ll be with HostRocket: thank you!

Adieu. Navid.