[jacques_chester]

> Page.ly are probably doing this to get more clients.

... huh?

Edit: are you suggesting that the poor service I got from WPEngine is in fact a cunning conspiracy to boost Page.ly sales?

Because ... well at least temporarily, yeah, I guess it worked perfectly.

"Cui bono?"

-dramatic violin music-

[csomar]

So you are the OP. I won't argue with you much. I'm in the WordPress business for many years. What I meant Page.ly is providing a generous support service to keep its' clients. This is a bad strategy because it makes wrong assumptions of what their main service is.

[thaumaturgy]

HN cracks me up sometimes. Above-and-beyond customer service is now "bad strategy"? Hah. :-)

[csomar]

Yes, it is. Because it creates bad assumptions. Now, you'll have a ton of noobs assuming that you do that and that for free because you already did it.

[thaumaturgy]

There's a section in Guy Kawasaki's Rules for Revolutionaries which talks about exactly this. Rules is still my go-to text for general business management advice. I'll quote the relevant parts here.

"Get Over the Paranoia: The story may be apocryphal, but Nordstrom supposedly allowed a customer to return an automobile tire that he insisted he bought at the store. Of course, Nordstrom doesn't sell tires.

"The paranoid would ask, ``But what if everyone who owns a car returned tires to Nordstrom? Nordstrom would go broke!'' But people won't (and don't), and Nordstrom will never be in danger of going bankrupt for accepting returns of goods it doesn't sell.

"Managers are afraid to implement customer-pleasing, revolution-catalyzing policies because they are afraid that too many people will take advantage of these policies, and they'll end up with the equivalent of a store full of tires."

The entire section goes on to talk about employee empowerment, allocentralism (putting yourself into your customer's shoes), examples from other businesses that either do this or don't, and so on; the relevant summary part from the text would probably be, "However, if your competition is asking people to do something suboptimal, then it's creating an opportunity for you."

So, straight up: it's certainly possible to run a business the way that you're describing. In fact, I'd guess that that's how most businesses run: they do as little as possible to make their money and meet -- but not exceed -- their customers' expectations. So you're not wrong as far as that goes.

But you are wrong to assume that they'll have "a ton of noobs" if they treat one particular customer really well. And, you're equally wrong to assume that having "a ton of noobs" is a bad problem to have; from another part of the same section of the book: "For example, a Whirlpool employee taped a news program's interview with Gail, a woman with several children and a full-time job. Whirlpool employees were challenged to provide appliances that would ``take care of Gail.'' In response, they redesigned the stovetop of Whirlpool's CleanTop to be completely flat, without grease traps or dirt-collecting crevices, and they created the Quiet Partner dishwasher, so the noise of the dishwasher wouldn't distract Gail. Viewing chores through Gail's eyes has helped Whirlpool introduce significant product enhancements."

Having "a ton of noobs" would mean a ton of new customers that are paying you money to show you what is wrong with your product or service. They are a great resource to have, if you take advantage of them. If you can identify one problem that 35% of "a ton of noobs" all have in common, and if you can automate the solution to that problem (or make it significantly easier to solve), then you have just achieved differentiation in a crowded market.

Yes, it can be painful in the short term. You might have to hire some more help -- and you might have to streamline some of your other internal process, like your ticket system, which will also pay dividends in the future.

Avoiding pathological customers is certainly good advice for freelancers, consultants, and really small shops. However, it is not necessarily the only good business strategy.

[jacques_chester]

Yes, I guess they should focus more heavily on the terrible customer service market instead.

[macspoofing]

No, what he means is that Page.ly went above and beyond what is reasonable for the price you're paying them. Yes, it was very nice of them, and most likely they did it because they are a young and hungry company. At the end of if all, I don't really get a sense from what you wrote that WPEngine service was terrible. It sounds like you were a difficult customer with difficult architectural issues that were ultimately the root cause of your performance issues.

[jacques_chester]

I don't see how an ordinary multisite installation -- which they specifically namecheck on their website -- is a "difficult architectural issue".

[grey-area]

It it really an ordinary multisite install though? Do you have 188590 comments? Wouldn't you have trouble with any hosted providers if you are doing operations on that many records in memory (whether that is the fault of WP, or custom plugin code, it doesn't really matter)? If that's the case, it looks like your site just isn't a good fit for this type of service, but millions of others (including multi-sites) with say a few hundred posts and a few hundred or perhaps thousand comments are.

It's a shame that you had to go through all of this trauma to discover this, and there are obvious support failings here, but it does seem that your site is out of the ordinary in some respects, just because of the number of comments on one WP instance.