360 Preemptive Support

360 is OUR version of what we believe TRUE managed WordPress should actually look like. It’s what we believe the industry needs, and it’s the way that we’ve wanted to provide end-to-end support from the very beginning.

And all of it is built in a way so that it’s not only holistic, taking your entire server health into account during a support interaction, but it’s 100% sustainable.

We’ve always had one (or more) hands tied behind our back when trying to provide application (website-specific) support in the past, and we believe that we have a way to actually do so without constraints and without concerns over the long-term viability of that effort.

You’ve likely experienced some version of reluctance or difficulty on our part, in terms of being able to properly handle your site-specific support issues before today.

This has really been for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is: we’ve never offered it! But extending beyond that gotcha, the real reason we haven’t been able to take things as far as we would like is that we couldn’t possibly afford to do so – with our all-you-can-eat, no limits on sites model.

AND, because you control everything that happens on your server, we can’t feasibly provide support for ONE specific site on a server when there are countless other sites on the exact same server AND/OR if there are customized configurations that we ourselves didn’t create.

So we’ve been severely constrained in our effectiveness, and many of you have experienced that wall where we’re able to provide you with a knowledge base article, for example, but we can’t actually execute on that KB on your behalf.

360 solves all of that, AND it allows us to really extend beyond the basic problems that we can see – the ones that you bring to our attention -. It allows us to extend our range and our expertise all the way out to the edges of your various site and server needs, all the way down to resource allocation and performance recommendations.

Before today, if you wanted site-specific support, we’ve had to give you vague generalities. We wish you the best of luck. Before today, all of us collectively had a very tough time defining exactly where our support stops and your responsibilities begin.

Before today, you’ve likely needed an extra layer of either staffing and/or personal struggle and effort to resolve more complicated site-specific issues.

But all of that changes with the release of 360 because NOW we’re able to operate as an extension of your team… and we’re able to do so without fear of being bankrupted by the process. (And also, because we’re able to see the entire server and all of the sites and configurations on it, we don’t have to worry about flying blind).

In fact, the ideal scenario with a site covered by 360 is that you don’t even have to alert us to a problem: we should know about the vast majority of issues LONG before you become aware of them yourself. Rather than needing to come in to support to raise a ticket, the various notifications from our monitors and internal health checks automatically come to our team 24 hours a day.

Let me give you a very specific example of what 360 does for YOU and your team, and this will hopefully shed more light on just how impactful this new support paradigm is…

The original seed behind 360 came from a trouble ticket that is sadly far too common on our platform: we had someone come into support – on the weekend, no less – with an emergency/critical “OMG My Site is DOWN!” ticket.

Within a matter of minutes, we had sent the initial response to the user, and within roughly an hour, the entire issue had been resolved. (This included – unfortunately – far too much back and forth with the user themselves, but that’s not really the point).

The real point here, upon performing the post-mortem of this ticket, was how easily the entire situation could have been prevented.

You see, the problem wasn’t actually that the site was down… the problem was that the client had changed their DNS for the www record for the URL in question. They didn’t change their www record AND their A record, they only changed the former.

Now, here’s where things went sideways: because their primary browser was Chrome because Chrome was enforcing HSTS, and because their SSL certificate failed to renew – due to the incorrect DNS settings – it appeared that the entire site was down. In fact, it may have even appeared as though the site itself was HACKED due to the security notification.

But here’s what actually got my head shaking and my blood boiling: our system had been throwing “SSL renewal error” notifications for nearly 30 days. Our system begins attempting Let’s Encrypt renewal checks far in advance of their actual expiration.

The real problem was that the client had either not seen the notifications, not understood what they meant, or let it slip their mind.

But this entire ticket – the whole FIRE behind this issue… it could have been completely prevented. The client, their client, and even our own team would have experienced FAR less stress… if those notifications had simply come to us in the first place, as well as the user.

This is exactly what 360 solves for, and it’s the type of “ticket” where a 360-covered site would NOT go down, the client would NOT freak out, and you’d simply wake up one morning to a closed-out ticket thread indicating that everything had been resolved for you, literally weeks before any problem could rear its ugly head.

Now, I can give you 100 more examples of situations in which 360 will be an instant lifesaver… but the truth is that I believe it will be most valuable in situations that we can’t yet think up.

Each and every single site and server is unique, each issue requires real-live human discernment, and almost every scenario that we mitigate with 360 will be unique. 

When logged into your GridPane account, head over to your Settings Page. Here, you will see the following two new options in the left-hand navigation – “Add-ons” and “Preemptive Support” – you’ll want to go to Add-ons FIRST in order to be able to add this support option to your account.

Now, once you select the Preemptive Support 360 option (or multisite if you’re looking for support for a network site), you’ll be able to select any given server on your account, and you’ll be given an approximation of what that server will cost based upon the number of sites that you have on that server. Note: For Developer Plus users, you can ignore this for your first 50 websites as you will not be charged once your server is accepted.

This view currently will accurately estimate your total (you get a certain number of servers included just by activating your account, and there is a minimum of five sites included in any plan, you can’t start smaller than that) but once you’ve initiated this process that server will be added to our enrollment queue.

Understand that UNTIL we accept your server, there is absolutely no charge for this enrollment, for the health check, or for any of the initial monitoring and auditing of your server. And we’ll break down the WHY behind that in just a second.

Before we get too far here, you must understand the following: if you currently have a site that is completely in shambles – DO NOT attempt to enroll that site and server in the 360 program. If you’re aware that you currently have all kinds of codebase issues with a given site, this is not a free debug session, AND we will likely reject this server outright if we discover that you’ve sent us a ticking time bomb.

This service is by far the most effective and impactful for you and your team if you’re having us inspect your fully functional and production workloads – sites that are mission-critical to you WHICH ARE CURRENTLY BEHAVING AS NORMAL.

Because of the highly labor-intensive nature of providing this type of support, we ABSOLUTELY can’t accept sites that we know are already completely dysfunctional. This is why we have to reject some of the servers that are submitted.