Dreamhost & WordPress could Learn from Tumblr

I’m having a new fun tumble blogging because its lack of politics and for the time being, with their recent simple features, could become great personal online scratch playground.

Moreover, I’m seeing a result of a very good customer service from the Tumblr crew when their leased servers outage brought the site down last weekend. However, the incident still brought user’s massive love to the crew. I am not sure what they do to their users but this is a great example of nothing but excellent customer service.

Now they might too busy to listen to this b.s. and might perhaps shut this site down, but i do think Dreamhost & WordPress could learn from Tumblr (WordPress beware!).

Update:
Seems like some beautiful people has visited this blog because of this post. So I decided to add some more points & backgrounds to make my statement above clearer. I hope.

I’m having fun using WordPress, in fact, i am amazed with what they can offer to their users. In fact, there are dozens of communities that constantly in praise of WP. Before i jump into WP bandwagon, i use blogger as my blog platform of choice, which lately I found as too robotic and too massive to care for their users. I mean it’s free what can you expect?

See i’m a sort of evangelist (read: expressive or might be outspoken) whose always express my opinion on everything & anything i use. That goes as well to WP. There are love and hate (single direction) between me and (to) WP as i express here, here and here.

ack to WP, after deciding to move to another level of internet self expression, i move from Blogger into self hosted WordPress blog. What i did first was choosing a hosting company. After did a small research, like many bloggers out there, i signed up to one of ‘WordPress standard hosting’ company recommended by WP, and I ended up with Dreamhost.

From the first week in DH was so bad. I got slow time at least 4-5 hours everyday (it super slow i can’t even reach my blog’s dashboard eventhough I’m using a DSL connection!) until their last major error on billing issues (i can’t put the link related to the stories here). I was so angry and lost my patience. The next day after the error I can’t reach my blog, my ftp account and my blog’s dashboard. I just can’t keep it cool anymore and so i expressed it to DH by sending an email that never gets replied. Soon after that, i emailed WP support also expressing my feeling and i let them know what i think, that it would be a bad business for WP to recommend DH as a standard web hosting.

I know why WP recommend those companies, it’s because they offer affordable price for rookie blogger like me to buy a host account with their so-called unlimited features. So it might be affordable and a win-win solution to everyone. And add to that, most bloggers out there are just rookies like me, who will never reach the maximum features we buy from them (bandwidth, server space etc etc). That kind of situation brings a lot of money to both WP & DH.

The evil side of this scenario is massive customer based that make them rich but often (always) underrated. This sort of power will somehow make WP & DH big companies, but blind on their customer’s problem.

Well in the end, who am I to change it. However I believe someday other people will do it, not for me but for all people that would agree with me.

What I see from this Tumblr case was (relatively) small, honest and passionate community that still supporting the company at their down time. It’s so entrepreneurial and I hope they keep that spirit alive. Big companies often lost their entrepreneuriality, and soon become boring, dumb and less passionate that often brings them to their downfalls.

No company is super company. This can be happen to everyone.

Author: Robin

Jack of all trades living in SF Bay Area, California. Asian.

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