I was near the end of my full feature free trial when I was contacted by “Artem” (I won’t reveal his last name for privacy reasons) by email.

I wrote back to say it wasn’t monitoring my sites properly. It said I had zero uptime, when clearly this isn’t true.

He said he’d work with me to fix that. I wrote back and said he doesn’t have to because I’ve looked at my needs and the free plan is the only thing I need right now anyway. I didn’t really think we could resolve the problem without a great deal of effort.

And in a way, I was right. Without mentioning money or a full service plan, Artem wrote back and immediately began helping me solve it with clear and insightful instructions and QUESTIONS. I am a big believer in asking questions to solve a problem.

We went through editing a certain WordPress security plugins to add their company to my white list. Ordinarily this is the fix and it didn’t work.

He asked me to send him a link to the complete code of a less popular WordPress security plugin he was unfamiliar with so he could study it and find a workaround. In the end, we determined this wasn’t the problem.

Finally, we realized it was something unique I had done to my setup of ChristophDollis.com when setting up a separate home page from the blog (i.e., ChristophDollis.com as opposed to ChristophDollis.com/blog) “optimally”… optimally for many purposes, but not for their service, anyway!

The simplest and best answer was just to monitor the blog’s homepage and not sweat troubleshooting for my rare installation. He’s enormously patient, but didn’t waste any time either.

While I “upgraded” to the free, not the paid, version at this time, I must say their customer support for someone who said he probably wouldn’t even need the paid service was awesome. This is an example of how to win great “word of mouth advertising”. He made me feel like a customer, even if I was just (currently) a non-paying customer.

I’ve heard good things about host-tracker.com from others and was disappointed it didn’t work for me. Now it does!

So consider this an enthusiastic plug for someone who believes in going the extra mile when providing service.

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The place to come for more appointments, more people in the door, and more sales!(sm)
© 2007-2008 Christoph Dollis Enterprises. Moral Rights Asserted.

UPDATE Monday September 23rd: Successfully installed WordPress. Post continues from original date…

I’ve been putting thought into that one off and on for a few days and get error after error.

Well, to console myself I entered a few search strings into Google. I read about the different problems people have with comment databases using software hosted on their own servers.

I was reading one post by Loren at Incremental Blogger, a business tech blog. Loren’s comments stopped working in July of ’06. When I tried to leave a comment today, they’re still broken — over one year later!

The reason I wanted to comment and ended up sending Loren an email instead is because I came across this gem:

Would you convince a friend to buy a computer that’s cool but not what they really need?

“There are some good suggestions in the currently posted 243 comments in the thread, however, a vast majority of them are posted more to advocate a particular product that respond to what the original poster is looking for. Come on folks. Is this really the way to do things?”

Read the whole article.

Loren makes a fantastic point.

In the entire thread, very few comments are addressed to what is in the best interests of the student who needs a computer to do certain specific tasks related to his education.

Instead, people chime in with all sorts of software and hardware solutions that have worked for them, but don’t take into consideration the fact the student does different types of work.

So they end up being confusing rather than persuasive.

Yet these same people, trying to be helpful, would be offended if they went into a computer or furniture store with a picture in their mind of what they wanted and were instead giving reams of data about the salesperson’s preference.

But this is exactly what happens all too often, isn’t it?

However, a few questions in that thread… good questions… about the student’s experiences with owning a computer, plans, and desires would have narrowed choices down. This would have left the commentator in a position to make a persuasive recommendation.

This recommendation, based on knowledge of the customer, would have given the commentator leverage to explain why the student should expand their budget if necessary to get the right solution.

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ChristophDollis.com Sales Pro
The place to come for more appointments, more people in the door, and more sales!(sm)
© 2007-2007 Christoph Dollis Enterprises. Moral Rights Asserted.