In my professional life, I’ve been one heck of a website ho. Stewarding website after website, using my pro tools and licenses and caring for dozens of websites for decades. After all, I started doing this in 1997, when life was simpler and building a website was the paid job, and hosting it was a little “add on.” Now maintaining a website is much more complicated, even if you don’t host it. And knowing how to troubleshoot integrations and figure out the problem to begin with, is an expertise.
IT people are on the front lines of bad and beta updates, weird integrations, malware, bots, and AI, not to mention nefarious hackers, all while minding marketing content. So it isn’t easy doing what they do: keeping your tech stuff clean and in good working order. Like you, the best web and IT pros are humans carefully stewarding as many things as they can. And it takes their personal energy to do so.
The largest companies utilize AI, Algorithms and Updates to make humans more and more dependent on them for commerce and connection. They encourage you to get better at their tools, not so you’ll be better, but because you’ll become a more dependent subscriber.
Anyone who works in IT knows these days, it’s been pretty much a thankless task, full of high stress and frantic people. Below is a message I just sent to a client who had taken over his own hosting and was a little Karen-esque to tech support. He was angered when his hosting went offline. My reply to him serves as a bit of an explainer about reasonable expectations in this realm, and a way to champion all the humans who’ve been stewarding the web for decades, with exploding inboxes, endless notifications, and worries about when the other shoe is about to drop.1
Dear ______
I’m so glad your website is up again. Another one of my clients (who usually caught tech issues immediately), had made his website his browser home page. Maybe a handy approach for you too?
By way of context: the world of the web is rapidly becoming much more complex, which means even pro services like $200/year hosting plans occasionally needs trouble-shooting by provider. This is true regardless of which hosting provider you use because of the variety of elements that make your website function like WordPress, third party plugins, MySQL databases, PayPal/eCommerce integration, pro Themes, php scripting versions, Apache servers, etc..
These parts update all the time— and not as a seamless whole. All are separate components, that may or may not play well together. They were made by different companies with different agendas. Constant updates are a great way to assure you’ll need “more care,” and they often explode the inboxes of tech pros.
Managed WordPress hosting plans start around $30/month and even they have occasional problems, but they basically just have human monitoring catching/fixing stuff quickly. You’ll still have issues, and a knowledgeable person will take responsibility for fixing them. You pay them in advance just to take that responsibility, not for any tasks executed per se. Watching for problems is an exhausting/expertise-intensive job in tech. Please be kind to your people. They are taking care of you.
The gold standard of WordPress hosting starts at $50k/year. This is what I recommend if someone wants to be able to expect something resembling ‘perfection’ from a service provider. That’s a real cost, and it’s deserved.
Stephen is a great guy at Viridio : one of the few human-led (and caring) customer service departments left in the biz, so I cherish him. GoDaddy has humans too, but they are trained to make sales, not handle tech per se. Of course, sometimes you need a higher-level tech person to handle the problem. Then it’s good to have positive, friendly relationships with folks who can evaluate the situations and know what to ask for.
- The shoe ‘kind of’ is dropping now. As more companies go to “cloud” or subscription models, tech behemoths are competing with one another to accrue more financial and technical power on the backs of humans. Individual web-mavens are forced to either compete at that level, or just keep gaining in expertise to correctly interact with these platforms. OR. maybe, not play that game at all. The thing is, if you are a human, with human values, you may not want to “trap” your customers into ongoing services. So the largest companies use Algorithms and push AI and Updates to make humans more and more dependent on them for commerce and connection, which in turn keeps them functioning and updating. Spoiler alert: they don’t all have your best interest at heart, but they do all want your information. ↩︎