A Tale of Two ISPs

Customer service is driving us from a dinosaur of an ISP to one that "gots it."

For a long time now, we’ve hosted www.pragmaticprogrammer.com on “one of the worlds largest ISPs.” Early on they worked out OK, but over the last year or so we’ve been incredibly disappointed with their customer service. We lose access to their servers, the databases go down, e-mail gets bogged down. All of this is bad, but it’s made infinitely worse by their oxymoronic customer service.

For example, last week the Mysql database on our server went down. We sent in a trouble report, asking them to look at it urgently, as our online store was down (it needs a database to run). Their response? "Your site isn’t down, because it still serves HTML pages OK." It took well over a day to get ourselves back online.

Contrast that with TextDrive, who I’ve recently started using for our more exotic hosting needs. They get it. You want multiple interlated domains? No problem. You want Ruby? Already installed, and installed well. You want to host Subversion repositories, or store your calendar using DAV? Just click a box.

And to top it all off, they understand customer service and technical support. When we have problems, they respond in minutes. Today I was trying to configure my new repositories a certain way. Not only did Jason Hoffman sort out all my problems, but he extrapoloted what I was trying to do in the long term, and preemptively offered to set it all up for me.

The days of the dinosaur are drawing to a close.