Customer service can make or break a company. Here’s a good example. In Eighty Days is hosted on Dreamhost’s servers in Los Angeles (in the Garfield Building, the same one where the MySpace facilities are located). This past month, we’ve seen outages like no other, downed websites and databases. I was really starting to question whether I should change hosting companies. Of course, I knew MySpace was having its problems, and therefore it was probably a broader issue, but seeing my friend’s site up (he’s also on Dreamhost) while mine was still down smelled of bad fish in NYC Chinatown on a hundred-degree day.

But, I kept sending e-mails to their admins, and they kept responding promptly; giving me concrete reasons for the outages. It all made sense to me in a language that I could understand: heat wave in LA, brown-outs, filer problems - they took responsibility where they should have. Then, they posted this detailed account of their failures:

“As I’m sure most of you already know, we’ve had nothing but troubles, large troubles, for pretty much the last three weeks. A lot of these troubles were our fault, a couple of them were at least ostensibly beyond our control, and they all compounded each other.

Here I’ll try and go into as much detail as possible about what happened, why, and the steps we’re taking to stop this sort of thing from ever happening again. I can’t excuse what happened, just apologize and hopefully elucidate.”

And I feel better - I won’t be moving hosting companies just yet. Simply because Dreamhost customer service is human, like me. I make mistakes, so it’s okay that they make mistakes every once in a while also. Which is way more than I can say for T-Mobile’s automated customer service hotline.