So it seems like there might be a trend starting about reporting positive customer support experiences. The funny thing is, I noticed it just after I had a great experience myself. First, I read Michael’s recent post, praising both Speakeasy and Bare Bones. Then, not necessarily a post about good experiences as an end-user, Brian at Unsanity had his own recent post. I suppose the reason why this kinda surprised me is because I read both these entries one right after the other (and it’s safe to say there isn’t necessarily a common thread to ordinarily link the two blogs).

Well, not five minutes before turning my attention to my favorite blogs, I checked the email for this account to get a startling example of “going above and beyond” in customer service by none other than my web hosting company, Server Logistics. I’ve already had a fair number of great experiences with them in the short time I’ve had this domain (and thus been a cheerleader from the beginning), but this really surprised me. The short story is that I’ve been having a bit of an issue with the mod_rewrite Apache module that is required for the pretty URL scheme for permalinks in WordPress. I googled, I crawled through the WordPress support forum, I even tried reading some tutorials on mod_rewrite. Everything I tried came up short. Exasperated, I shot Aaron from SL an email. It’s not really his/SL’s problem, but I figured it was worth a shot. He asked me a few questions, I took forever to get back to him (and apologized profusely) and he wrote back that he think that he fixed it by doing a little twiddling to my .htaccess file. Bang. Fixed. No more problems. Totally did not have to do that, but he did all the same. Aaron’s the man. No doubt in my mind.

You also have to realize that I started this relationship without necessarily not having the most stringent expectations — don’t get me wrong! It wasn’t because I had read or heard anything that would make me think that SL was anything but great, just that I hadn’t read or heard anything about them. At all. Why did I decide to go with them? Well, I had three criteria that I was more or less not going to be flexible with: (1) Price (can’t really afford too much presently to throw at this venture), (2) the ability to run a blogging package, and (3) the ability to host on a OS X platform. I figured points (1) and (3) would give me a narrow selection to choose from (it did), and thus it wouldn’t really give me the best opportunity to get a kick-butt hosting service. Man, oh man - I am so happy I was wrong. Server Logistics ROCKS! I can’t recommend them highly enough!

Update: Add Adriaan from the ecto project to the list of great & speedy responses. I’d been bashing my head repeatedly against the proverbial wall trying to get ecto to work with my WordPress installation for a few days now. Tonight (7/26) I posted to the support forums for help and now I’m using ecto to update this post. Nifty!