Cheers to customer service.

A couple of weeks ago I moved Renegade to Dreamhost from GoDaddy (more about them a bit later) and, as it happens, I was doing too many things at once and not truly paying attention to any of them. A new host dashboard, coupled with a new theme dashboard, and I thoughtlessly made a change I couldn’t back out of, causing my site to go into immediate FAIL mode and me to go into immediate *headdesk* mode. Sometimes I actually know when to raise the white flag, and I decided to brace myself for that call: the Support Cry for Help.

Unlike the crapbomb that is GoDaddy’s site, Dreamhost was, well, a dream compared to what I was used to. The process to open a support ticket was painless and clear, and offered me drop down options like the following:

Funny, right? And yet I understood the choices, and was easily able to choose the best answer for the situation.

I’m not a hardware gal. I know enough to be reckless and get myself into trouble, so I figured it was better safe than sorry. I blurted out my stupidity and threw myself on the alter of IT Forgiveness, prepared for ridicule.

I’ve danced with Support before; I knew I was in for a long set of back and forth messages for a stupid problem. Lo and behold, the response:

And just like that, it was done. Not that my error was the end of the world, mind you, but he didn’t treat me like the ID-10-T error (wait for it… pretend the numbers are letters… there you go!)  I clearly was. Antonio was lovely, effective, and set things right for me — and even played along. I’m grateful he showed empathy for my predicament, and right now I’m pretty much in love with him. If not with Antonio, then definitely with Dreamhost. Their process is clean and easy to understand, and altogether painless for the user. My user experience here was completely unlike anything I’ve had with GoDaddy, with their site full of jargon, unfindable mishmosh of words and, if it wasn’t for the phone number in the upper left corner, I’d probably still be stuck there.

Which brings me to the mea culpa I referred to earlier: I made an assumption about GoDaddy that turned out to be false (at least on this particular occasion). Unfortunately, for a period of about 12 hours, my hosting rolled over with GoDaddy and I freaked out. After trying to find support on their site — which I’m still convinced is a roach motel, designed to make you not find help and just give up in frustration — I could only guess what sleazy excuse they were gonna give me to keep my $80 hosting fee. So I girded my loins, readied myself for the fight, picked up the phone, and made the call. And Brian, the guy on the other end of the line? He told me he could certainly reverse the charges and shut down the site for me. No bile, no argument, no making me feel guilty that I was leaving them as fast as my legs could sprint me away. Given my previous experience with GoDaddy, I really didn’t expect the result I got. So apparently I’ve learned that IT people at hosting companies can be nice to idiot customers, and you shouldn’t paint the employee with the same brush you’d use on their employer’s reputation. They can turn out to be nice and refund you $80, which you can then use to buy more tequila when you realize you’ve forgotten to backup the folder of images from your last site and will be fixing each post by hand, because you care.

But I tip my glass to Dreamhost. And even GoDaddy. Cheers to their customer service.

Now where did I put that tequila?