What is Preemptive Support?

One of the single most frustrating things that I ever experienced in website hosting – and I’ve seen a metric-buttload-of-bad – was when one of my customers sites totally folded on itself and… nothing happened.

No one did anything.

Not the visitors, because they couldn’t visit.

Not the client because they never touched their own site – that was my job.

And not me, because I didn’t know anything then.

But, most importantly… not the “managed” WordPress provider I was paying a good amount of money to every month.

They didn’t do anything because, get this: they don’t monitor their clients’ sites for downtime. That’s not part of their job apparently. They’re too busy making WordPress run super awesome.

Let me repeat this so it really sinks: No part of their core deliverable involves ensuring that their core deliverable is delivered.

I’m having difficulty coming up with a good analogy, excluding politics, because there are too many to list.

I’ll try anyway: it would be like if you went to pick up your wedding cake and they brought out a burning pile of all your melted childhood toys. Or they brought out nothing. That would be more analogous, I guess.

That whole deal was probably one of the original seeds for Preemptive Support™.

And by “seed” I mean the rage-powered dragon that lives inside my brain which occasionally lays waste to everything in sight.

The fact that you need to tell your website host that your website is down is… how do I put this?

It’s world-class, nuclear stupid.

And there are all kinds of problems like that, everywhere in this industry.

I don’t like those problems. They’re not interesting or novel in any way, whatsoever.

So how about we all just agree to not do that kind of stuff anymore, OK?

What if we tried… to just make the easy stuff go away as quickly as possible?