I’ve been writing on Phoenix Real Estate Guy for over six years. There are a LOT of posts there. Lots of photos. And thousands of comments.
I like to tinker with the site. I tweak and twiddle, constantly shifting things about and trying new ideas.
Tonight I just wanted to make a very minor styling change. Not being a coder, at all, it’s always a chore. But it’s a chore I enjoy.
Until that is, I pull up the site expecting to see the fruits of my labor only to be presented with a blank white screen.
This never ceases to instill panic. What. If. Everything. Is. Lost? Yes, I have backups, but backups fail and the thought of restoring a six year old blog from the ground up is daunting.
I still have no idea what I did tonight to implode the damn blog. Usually this happens when I do something stupid in a php file. I’ve never (until today) wrecked the blog by editing a CSS file.
Fortunately I was able to get a fantastic technician, Brian R, at my host Rackspace. Many times if you call a web host you will get a response like, “This is a WordPress problem, not a server issue. We don’t support WordPress. Good luck!”
But Brian dove right in. He obviously had WordPress knowledge and skills and combined with my passing knowledge and skills we managed to return the blog to its former glory.
So thanks Brian. You saved me a lot of time and heartburn. It’s refreshing to get stellar customer service that goes well beyond the call of duty.
Don’t you just love a company that does not have “It’s not my job” attitude?
Jay,
You probably already know to do this… But I set up a dummy site to test changes I make before deploying them on my live domain. I’ve broken my website on more than one occasion by now to want to deal with issues like that again, heh.
I know the feeling very well, Jay 🙂 Even though, most of the time, I feel confident with CSS, HTML, JS and PHP I’m a total noob when it comes to linux shell. I like the “idea” of the command line – it feels badass :)lol The problem with it though, you have to know 100% what you’re doing, because linux has a tendency not to ask for your confirmation. On a few occasions I completely wiped out gigabytes of data, files and databases with a line of code less than a few words. It feels like you’re falling, everything rises to the top inside of you, you can feel the rash of adrenalin followed by terror 🙂 But it’s a good exerciser, makes you realize the worst and prepare for it + work the drill to make sure you can handle it when the sky falls for real 🙂
Tech support is what makes or breaks a webhosting service. I’ve actually turned down some amazing offers from hosting companies that could save me a lot of money in the long run solely due to the after-sales support they provide. Cheap hosting can be found anywhere these days – but a webhosting company with great tech support and customer care service is rare jewel.