The Dirty Secret Behind System Upgrades

Our staff has been working extra long hours this week in order to move customers off of servers with older software, and put them on newer Plesk servers. This will benefit our customers immensely.Here’s how:

1. The older system was very limited in what we had control over. We actually rented the servers back in 1999 from a company called Alabanza and they had the best software/hardware offering at the time. But, as the years have passed we have found that we want all our customers to benefit from the robust and more efficient software that we have chosen called Plesk and not just new customers. (We started offering Plesk to new customers about 2 years ago.) Plesk gives us more control and ultimately that helps customers.

2. The older system had some bugs that we had to find work arounds for. Mainly email was a problem on the older system. Plesk on the other hand has a very powerful and reliable backend email system. You can imagine how frustrating it is for our techies to have to spend so much time trying to make these work arounds! That is time that in my opinion is just wasted time. The software that we offer our customers should be the best, and this older system just was not the best anymore.

3. Plesk gives the user more site tools. There over 50 site tools in the Plesk control panel that come free, and new tools are added frequently. With the old system, you only had access to a handful of site tools.

The problem with mass-migrating a pile of customers to a better product is that even if it is a much better system, it is almost impossible to avoid a problem. There are unforseen problems, unavoidable problems like a customer with custom configurations that we don’t know about, and problems that happen when someone for some reason doesn’t get our communications. This means we get the one thing we absolutely hate to have – unhappy customers.

During the move there were 2 main problems that arrose and they were with regard to email. For example customers using Exchange would have to edit their MX records to reflect the change, but also many other customers would ultimately need to have other changes made to fix their email.

We sent emails to all customers who would be affected weeks in advance explaining what they should expect, and what action they might have to take if any to make the move smoother for them. But, lets face it, we don’t all read every single email we get anymore! Needless to say our technical support phone, chat, and Help Desk were very busy for a few days. We did continue to get the message out to many of you via our phone system, our Support Page etc. And that helped a lot. But others had to wait on hold way too long, wait on chat too long, or wait too long for a Help Desk ticket to be resolved.

Happily it was a vast majority of our customers who were happy about the move and had nothing but good things to say about the increase in speed, and usability of the new system.

Even though I have been in this business for 8 years now, it still saddens me to see any customer unhappy. Martin & I get copies of ALL customer comments that are submitted, we see Help Desk tickets, chats, and we are able to listen to tech support phone calls. We talk daily with our Director of Operations to discuss just a single unhappy customer and what we need to do to fix their problem and how fast it will take to get it done. We have over 12,000 customers right now, but just one unhappy customer sends us into alert mode still to this day. As it should!

So let me just say this in closing. Many people consider their Internet provider to be some sort of big company that really does not care a lick about them. But if you could see the passion and commitment that I see from our technical support team every day you be moved. The energy they put into each and every Help Desk ticket, chat and phone call is truly amazing. They form a tough skin too, because customer support can be rough!

The dirty secret then is this: No migration is going to be completely without its problems. The way you react to the problems is what matters. And I want to thank each and every one of you for your support during this milestone!! We had about a 2% drop rate due to the migration, and that is extremely low in this industry!! Most of you were calling, emailing, and chatting with our tech support and thanking them.

We have a lot more exciting things coming up now that many small businesses are going to love! Have you seen our new company Press 8? If not you should really go to our site: www.press8.com. We are offering Hosted Business Phone Systems. We are one of the only companies to offer immediate sign up! Plans start at just $14.95/mo. This new technology is impressive and we are very happy to be one of the first companies to start offering it.

We are almost finished testing our new Hosted Exchange and Hosted Sharepoint offerings. Many of you have been calling saying that you really need Exchange for your company. We hope to have it tested and ready by the end of June.