Well I’m off to a good start, not sure how but I managed to break my wife’s site Cake by Sadie Smith. This is the first site I hosted with Tsohost and I built this at my wife’s request for her cake making business. This is early days in my website building experience and I developed the site online and did not have a copy locally (which I now always do). I wanted to test some new plugins and as you can host up to four sites on the standard plan in my wisdom I though I would take a copy of the site and host this under a spare domain.
I broke the original site
After creating the new test account I copied the old site over and somehow I managed to break the original site. I am not sure how as I made no changes to the original site but the domain was now redirecting to the test site which was not working correctly and I could not access the WordPress admin area to check the urls. I had broken the site and now had no way to access the admin area, now I am not suggesting that my wife’s site has hundreds of visitors an hour but I was starting to panic slightly and needed to get this fixed quickly. I deleted the test account but this still left the original site broken, time to raise a ticket.
Support response times
I initially raised a ticket through the Tsohost client area at 3:55 pm entitled ‘Site Not Working’.
The first response came back at 4:02 pm which was pretty quick stating that there could be a problem with the theme and had I tried to change it, I explained the chain of events and waited for a response.
At 4:18 pm I posted again with some more information which may help and I was keen to get a response.
Telephone support call
The site had been broken for about half an hour and despite a quick response initially I had not heard anything else. In my slightly panicked state and because I’m impatient by nature I phoned support, bearing in mind I am paying £2.99 a month for hosting up to 4 sites I was not expecting much. I got straight through and explained my issue to the support representative, there is something reassuring about being able to talk to someone in these situations rather than starting at a ticketing system waiting for a response.
The advice was to restore the site form last nights backup, they would need my authorisation to do this and I was told to update the existing ticket stating this.
At 4:33 pm I updated the ticket and awaited a response.
5:01 pm I got a ticket response asking my to try the site again, and all was back to normal. I asked what the issue was and apparently there was an issue with the database so I was not really any the wise as to what I did but was just relieved to get the site back.
Summary of my first proper support request
Considering this was my mistake in the first place to have this fixed in an hour on an £2.99 per month plan is quite impressive (I have used Rackspace before and as a high end provider this would have been quick for them). Telephone support was accessible and helpful and on a cheap web hosting plan something you would not expect. Biggest lesson from this was to develop locally and leave the live sites alone, time to install Wamp.