Downtime and customer service
So I had an interesting experience today.
You may or may not have noticed that for at least seven hours, Write for Your Life was either inaccessible or just featured the illustrated border with a big white space where the content should go. Pretty embarrassing. Not at all good.
I think I’m reasonably tech-savvy and can navigate my way around a WordPress theme with an understanding of what does what. But when an entire site stops working, I don’t have the skills or knowledge to immediately pin down the root of the problem. You know, I’m a normal person.
So naturally, after having a quick look at my theme files without any luck, I got straight on to my hosting service, AN Hosting. First, I contacted them through Twitter, but after an hour or so without a reply, I wrote to their customer support team with my tale of first-world woe.
Several hours later and a few further failed attempts at getting hold of someone who could explain the problem, I decided to head back into the code and have another look. I did what every non-developer should avoid: I began messing with stuff I didn’t fully understand.
And it worked! I removed the code and copy that goes in the little bird’s speech bubble in the site’s header and hey presto!
Of course, I immediately felt guilty about all my messages to customer support and less than complementary tweets about the lack of a reply. It looked like, actually, though I hadn’t changed anything to make it happen, the problem ultimately lay with the site, not the hosting.
Or at least it did until AN Hosting finally contacted me to say that they had moved to a server with an updated version of PHP, which is what had made the offending code (generated by a plugin) incompatible.
Well, why didn’t you say so? I gasped, but with added expletives.
If I’d have had some kind of warning that there might be a problem, I could have done something about it, or at least have had the comfort of knowing what the cause was. It seems very odd for them to let customers’ websites go down and only tell them afterwards that they knew it might happen.
I mean, what if this site was my livelihood? I’d have been seething, as opposed to what I have been, which is, well, slightly miffed.
Anyway, what’s any of this got to do with writing? Absolutely nothing, I’m afraid. But it does confirm that if you tried to access the site today and wondered what the flipping Hectors was going on, it wasn’t you. The internet is alive and well.
As for sensible customer service, I’m not so sure.
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Out of curiosity, and in the interest of avoiding
it, what was the offending plug-in?
I’ve found the world of WordPress plug-ins to be
disappointing, on the whole. Poorly written and insufficiently
tested. Try setting WP_DEBUG to true (in wp-config.php) and watch
those error messages spew forth.
Hullo Captain!
The plug-in was called Twounter and I used it to simply pull in my exact number of Twitter followers. Generally, I try and use as few plugins as possible, because you’re right, they can be a bit temperamental.
Iain