I just received some memorable customer support from host-tracker.com, a well-known website “uptime” monitoring service based in the Ukraine.

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.

By Christoph Dollis at 5:02 AM on Wednesday March 5th, 2008, and filed under Questions.

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