Want to Keep Customers? Try Using Good Documentation

Ok. so I’ve spent the past 5 days wasting time to get Inside Out, Upside Down configured on my new hosting server. I had to migrate all of my accounts from an old server which ran FreeBSD to a new shared hosting server on Solaris. Among the migration was a whole new structure of user names, directories and passwords. None of which migrated without change. Of course not everything changed, only a few really key specifics that have caused me much grief. My biggest grief…. my hosting companies documentation. Now, I believe I’m a fairly intelligent person, I’ve got a solid computer science background and I can read directions. With that being said, it should be reasonable to assume that I should have had no problems making the changes and installing everything on the new server. I’ve done many installs of Wordpress before so I’m pretty familiar with the ins and outs. Sadly this was not the case.

The lack of documentation for the new setup really hindering my ability to everything up and running. I wasted a ton of time, a ton of support tickets and I was ready to leave my hosting company for lack of support. Finally days later, a support person told me that there was a 16 character limit with the usernames and that the username would automatically be truncated (of course the documentation doesn’t tell you how it’s truncated and it’s not clearly done as one would think it was). Needless to say, it was a small syntax change to my user accounts that solved the problem. Sadly this could have been prevented in the first place if it was clearly explained in their documentation.

I can’t stress enough to companies that the better the documentation is for using their product or service, the better experience the user will have which means the happier the customer will be.

So finally, all of my websites are up and running smoothly on the new servers at Joyent. For now, I’m staying put but it has been a “rocky” experience that left me wondering who else out there could provide the same service, but better.